She is the bar part of the bar. She is not exactly shielded, but apart from some information she freely tells anyone who asks whether they do it out loud or not (basic features of the premises, the offer of a free drink, the unavailability of menus, etcetera) it is all buried so deeply that any probe attempting to collect it without Bar conversationally participating in the exchange would just get lost or snap off.

Chocolate coffee, suggests Bar. With cinnamon and nutmeg. The passage of time is typically but not absolutely reliably paused.

'Eh, I'm sure I can get an excused absence when I explain what I was doing. Interesting things like this don't happen every day, and you look safe enough that Dad wouldn't be retroactively overprotective about it. I haven't really had coffee very much, but I'll defer to your judgement without too much trepidation."

A mug appears. There's whipped cream.

You're welcome.

'Pity Emily's out at the moment, I'm sure she'd love this,' Edie reflected not-entirely-internally. 'Although--hm. This place isn't on a planet, is it.'

Not as such.

'So it probably doesn't have a proper native magnetic field. That would definitely be a downside for her.'

Some people who normally have reason to find environments like this one uncomfortable do not in fact have that problem in Milliways, but I cannot guarantee either way how she would react if she were here.

'Not uncomfortable, exactly. At least I don't think so, it's not like Emily--or Dad, for that matter--have ever been off Earth. But--' she briefly summarizes her bizarre family situation and her sister and father's mutation. 'I have no idea how they'd react, honestly, but it probably wouldn't be as bad as strongly variant temperatures or pressures or something.'

Bar has no comment.

'Moot point, anyway,' Edie concludes.

The door opens.

Edie turns around. "Oh, hello," she says out loud. "This is Milliways! It's some kind of transdimensional bar. The actual bar is a person, her name's just Bar."

"I don't actually know what that means, but I think it's probably mistaken. Buh, how do I put this in words, verbal communication's so inefficient."

If that's really the problem...

'Ooh! (nonverbal conceptual summary of Milliways) I didn't realize you were telepathic too, your mind's all (psychic impression of her shielding from the outside)'

Most people don't have shields, do they? Isn't someone with shields more likely to be a subtle artist?

'Most people don't, but you don't have to be telepathic to have them. (psychic impression of the shielding her father uses when he doesn't want mental company but isn't wearing the helmet) And you didn't feel like (psychic impression of another telepath who doesn't want mental company). Is subtle arts the name of your kind of telepathy?'

"...Telepathy is the most common and salient manifestation of the subtle arts," corrects the subtle artist slowly.

"Ooh, what else can you do? I'm just a telepath. Well, I say just, it's fantastic and I wouldn't want to give it up. But it doesn't come with extras."

"I have a little telekinetic potential but no noticeable pyrokinesis."

"Huh. Jean has telekinesis on top of her telepathy but I've never heard of either of those going with pyrokinesis. I suppose your world must be different from mine. Well, it's not like I thought you were a mutant telepath anyway."

"I suppose you're from another plane entirely. Extraplanar studies," she snorts again.

"I suppose plane's as good a word for it as any. They can travel to other--planes, dimensions, whatever, where you're from? That must be interesting."

"Well, traveling there is usually not advised, but some people study them or summon things from them, that sort of thing. I assume somebody majoring in it took this supply closet for a test subject for a spell or something."

"I'm fairly certain that Milliways has been around way longer than it would have to be for it to be a creation of a random college student...but on the other hand, Bar did say that time weirdness happens sometimes. I'm probably not late to Calculus, for example, despite having been hanging out here for a while and only having been a few minutes early when I came in."

"I'm not sure if they summoned it or made it or baited it with extraplanar bar treats," says Aether. "I'm not certain they were involved at all. It's just how I'm categorizing the event." She sits at the bar. A brief telepathic conversation later, she receives a peanut butter milkshake.

"Fair enough. I'm categorizing it as 'weird shit happens to my family' and being glad it's not even a little bit trying to kill me."

"It is awfully friendly for an extraplanar bar."

"I confess I have no particular expectations for extraplanar bars to compare this one to, but it is quite friendly compared to--well, life in general. Ooh, I should check if I can get things from here to solve problems back home."

Mmm, milkshake. "Like what?"

"I don't know, advanced medical technology to reverse-engineer or advice on social activism. More likely the technology, I think--Bar, do you sell things like that?"

"I'm fine, I'm not going to drown in milkshake, that would be undignified. Did you just say you're going to buy technology from Bar and reverse-engineer it?"

"Well, probably not me personally, I don't have a lot of money on me and I'm not the best person to guess what's reverse-engineerable in the first place. I'll probably get Papa and maybe Dr. McCoy in here and let them do it. I am not actually a seventeen-year-old with enough money and knowhow to do that kind of thing. That would be silly."

"Are you from some kind of science fantasy world?"

"...Mutants have been accused of being particularly fantastical, but I've never heard of technology described that way."

"I mean, mutants is a kind of science fantasy word but that could have just been an aesthetic thing."

"We did only come into the public consciousness less than two decades ago. I think the word was used in sci-fi before that."

"You're science fiction to yourselves?"

"Mutants in pre-nineteen sixties science fiction do not strongly resemble actual, real life mutants."

"Okay, but the technology before. Are we talking, like - what do you have, is this a word for 'we invented the wheel' or do you have - 'internal combustion engines' or 'immutable laws of physics'?" She says these phrases like one might expect a person to say "crystal-energy powered chariot" or "divine blessings".

"I. Am not sure what the alternative is? To immutable laws of physics, anyway, I suppose combustion engines are less mandatory."

"Okay. Great. The supply closet has a portal to an interplanar bar with a science fantasy person in it. Of course."

"I'm sorry, are you saying your world doesn't have laws of physics? How do you exist if you can't depend on the strong nuclear force keeping your atoms together?"

"I... don't know what you're talking about?"

"Everything is made of smaller things--your body is made of your organs which are made of tissues which are made of cells which are made of molecules which are made of atoms which are made of protons, neutrons and electrons and the protons would fly away from each other if the strong nuclear force...wasn't overcoming the electromagnetic repulsion, so I suppose if you don't have that either your individual protons aren't necessarily desperately fleeing one another but that doesn't explain why they exist in the clumps you need in order to get something as complicated as an amoeba let alone a human being!"

"I mean, maybe in your world. You sound like a cartoon character when you talk like that."

"Okay, if you don't have laws of physics, why do you have a consistent down? I'm assuming you have a consistent down. Do you have a consistent down?"

"Usually, yes."

"There cannot possibly be no laws of physics in your universe. How would anything work?"

"I mean, things are often consistent, they just aren't laws. And you don't poke them if you know what's good for you. I've heard there are parts of the Shift that don't have a down anymore because someone did experiments and the universe got sick of it."

"The universe got sick of it. So it's not that you don't have laws of physics, it's that they stop working if you look at them too closely...that's terrible. And probably a good thing I didn't do a better job explaining anything about how they work to you."

"They're not laws. It's not a law that you say 'hi' when you encounter someone, you could not do it if you wanted, and if every single time you said 'hi' someone wrote it in a notebook and went 'hmm' and then walked around the block to bump into you again, you'd get sick of it and start telling them 'fuck off' instead. It's like that. You're probably fine explaining how your world works, mine's different, like I said you sound like a cartoon character. We have science fantasy fiction."

"I mean that your world probably has its...tendencies of physics that are mostly the same as my world's laws of physics otherwise we couldn't comfortably co-occupy the same space because you'd be leaking random radiation or unable to digest the same compounds...Bar, was the drink you gave her something I could have harmlessly consumed?"

Yes.

"So my rules are probably close enough to your guidelines that knowing about them isn't the best possible idea if you live in a world where it's possible for the gravity to be randomly switched off because someone looked at it too closely."

"There is literally a comic book where the protagonist derives their powers from knowing the 'gravitational constant' and the principles of 'air resistance'. I mean, feel free not to give me a splash page's worth of jargon, but don't worry about it too much. I'm not going to climb a tall building and drop things off it."

"Those...are actual things. Although I'm not sure how you derive superpowers from knowing them, unless you have an unrelated power and can leverage those things towards applying them creatively...like my parents and Dr. McCoy did with Professor Cassidy. Hm."

"I haven't actually read an entire issue of Ballistic Warrior, so I can't describe how the science powers are supposed to work."

"If your science fantasy uses a lot of real science, you kind of have to wonder how they got it, if poking at the world is metaphysically discouraged."

"I couldn't begin to tell you. Maybe it's the extraplanar studies people."

"Maybe. That would explain it better than anything else I could think of, although if your world has reasonably frequent access to universes that don't collapse like a souffle when you poke them wrong I'm not sure why there are any extraplanar studies people left in your world."

"I guess it's not that easy to leave. Or they have families or something. I'd think twice about escaping to a science fantasy world and all I'd be leaving behind would be parents and a degree program in subtle arts."

"I'd suggest that some of my people could probably grab your parents except that I'm not sure I'd trust your world not to straight-up nope our abilities."

"Ugh. I hate not being able to do anything to help. ...Of course, I haven't been working on the problem long, I could think of something else, but your world seems kind of comprehensively designed to make helping difficult."

"A bit, yes. If I could be sure I wouldn't deregularize your nice science fantasy physics, I'd love to live in a world like that."

"You have blue jeans. How do you have blue jeans if you can't science?"

"...Does cultivating cotton require science where you're from? Where I'm from I think it involves putting cotton seeds in the ground."

"No, but I'm pretty sure turning cotton into denim does...I could be wrong, I don't pay a lot of attention to textiles, it's not an area of interest for me or anyone who lets me into their head a lot. I'm not doubting your word, mind, just trying to get as much of a feel for the system you have in place as possible."

"I don't pay attention to textiles either but I think there's... spinning? Weaving? Those being textile things."

"Science is a pretty comprehensive concept, though, you need to experiment to see what techniques will work and which ones won't. I think denim needs more processing than a lot of things? I don't know. I'm just taking shots in the dark. You know what, I live in a boarding school, surely someone amongst the teachers and students has a relevant expertise. I'm going to see if I can get anyone to volunteer advice if not direct help."

"If you like."

She heads toward the door.

The door ceases to exist. How impolite of it.

'...Bar, why did the door go away?' There is an edge of fear in Edie's mental voice.

I cannot speculate on the reasoning behind it, but it is very unlikely to keep you here for longer than a day or two. Probably less. I apologize; I cannot control the door or contact whoever does.

"...Um, do you have money to get yourself food here...? Like, I'm a college student but if you don't I can probably cover you for the day or two."

"What? Yeah, I have some money on me." she fidgets a little. "I just don't like being separated from my sister, that's all."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. It could be worse. I get to go home when this is over, and everyone's going to be okay, and as long as I'm holding the door while other people go in and out we should still be able to improve the state of the art in medical technology, and that by itself would be worth it. It's just a little uncomfortable in the meanwhile."

"I'm an only child so I guess I don't know what it's like."

"Well, it's different for us than it is for normal siblings. We're twins, and I've been a telepath since before we were born. Not having her in the back of my head is literally physically uncomfortable."

"Wow. I've never heard of prenatal telepathy doing much of anything like that. Although I guess I don't know any subtle artist twins."

"Oh, my sister's not a telepath. She does magnetism. Which...you probably don't have in no-science world. She can manipulate metal and fly and do a couple of other things that make sense if you science at them."

"I think magnetism exists? I'm not actually sure. But if it exists it's obscure. The word translates, anyway."

"Well, you couldn't get half of what my sister and Dad do with it without the use of science, I'm sure. I wonder if your planet is a magnet like ours is."

"If it is I haven't heard about it."

"Do you have a north? I think magnetism is part of what distinguishes north from south..."

"There's a north, yeah, and a south and an east and a west."

"Magnetism has north and south poles, just like a planet. Compasses point north because they're a bit magnetic, and can be less accurate if you're close to another source of magnetic fields. Not that I can have any confidence that yours would work the same way."

"That doesn't sound really familiar."

"It would be foolish to expect it to, if I sound like a cartoon character to you. ...I wonder if you'd sound like a cartoon to me, if you were to describe how your world works. Well, to someone from my world, anyway, I've never been fond of cartoons. Or any other form of television, for that matter."

"Me either, but people leave it on in the lounge. I can explain stuff but I'm not sure where to start."

"I hang out with geniuses who don't object to a little telepathic poking, so I'm probably a better than average person to be describing how a world works," she admits.

"Oh, I'm not bad at that either, hardly a week goes by that a dwarf or a mermaid or something isn't asking me a mildly to moderately embarrassing question about how humans work, but you haven't asked me anything."

"Or something. Last weekend it was a neko."

"Okay, dwarves and mermaids are fictional in my universe but I have no idea what a neko is."

"Neko are a kind of yokai from another country - I don't think there's an immigrant Imperial population, but I'm not sure."

"I don't think I know what a yokai is...Bar, are there any legends in my world about creatures called yokai or neko or what have you?"

In Japan, says Bar.

"Okay, so we have stories about those too. In Japan, where I've never been and which has a completely different cultural history from my country."

"Huh. ...Do you have anything besides humans?"

"Some people claim that mutants aren't quite human."

"Yeah, but besides that, you're basically just a subtle artist and I'm a human."

"Well, some of us are more dramatically divergent than others. My Aunt Raven is blue and scaly, and my friend Sophie is green. But no, as far as I know humanity is it as far as sentient life goes."

"That sounds... simpler, I guess, but a little samey."

"I don't know, humanity comes in all different kinds of cultures. I don't know how different your different species' cultures are, though."

"Very. And there are still plenty of different human cultures too."

"All right, I'll take your word for it. I still think it's unlikely that most people spend enough of their time interacting with completely different cultures that my world is practically that much more samey for individuals who live in it."

"My area's pretty cosmopolitan - it's a big famous school, plenty of international students, elves, etcetera. But maybe, sure."

"I actually also am at a big famous school, but yours sounds like it's a university, mine's just a boarding school."

"Yeah, I'm in college."

"I go to a boarding school for young mutants. My parents run the place, so."

"Makes sense. My mom is a teacher but she teaches kindergarten."

"I'm probably going to teach there when I'm older, but I'm not sure if I want to teach younger kids or older kids."

"I'm going into therapy; it's the obvious subtle arts track."

"Oh, that's good. We haven't had telepaths long enough for psychic psychiatry to have caught on yet."

"...What, do you just have non-telepaths doing therapy? That's weird."

"I mean, it's better than not having therapy at all, and we didn't publicly have telepaths until recently."

"I suppose. In my world you can't even get into the classes if you aren't a subtle artist."

"Yeah, public acceptance of mutants is nowhere near good enough to start doing things like that."

"There's acceptance problems? I get people thinking I'm incontinently reading their minds - which is a problem some subtle artists have, just not me - but it's not, I don't know, systematic."

"I mean, we're a new minority, of course there's acceptance problems. They're nowhere near as bad as they could be, though, being a mutant isn't as socially inconvenient as being, say, gay. Or black."

"How socially inconvenient is being gay or black, there? They're both fairly minor inconveniences depending on your family in the one case, region in the other."

"I don't have an exact idea, given that I live in the awesome progressive school where one of the teachers is all three and no one really comments--but I do know that I legally can't claim my sister and one of my dads because explaining why I have two dads was deemed too socially risky by people who're social progressives in just about every way."

"That sucks. Like, anywhere? It's not just around certain religious groups or elf-haters or something?"

"It's stronger around certain religious groups, but not exclusive to them."

"...You probably don't even have elves. Elves are usually gay. At least in practice."

"Huh. That must make reproduction interesting. And no, we don't have elves, as far as I know."

"Well, they're immortal, so they have no need to be particularly urgent about reproducing."

"Oh, that makes sense. Proper immortal or just unaging immortal?"

"Just unaging. And a lot of them develop ennui and commit suicide."

"What are they doing wrong with their lives that...oh, I suppose 'learn everything and then some' is less of an option in your universe."

"I mean, there is that, but I don't think I'd develop ennui and kill myself when I was a thousand years old. There's books to read and places to travel and there are still things to learn, just, you know, not scientifically, if I were immortal I'd at least dual major and be a wizard too."

"Well, no, neither would I, but then you and I are reasonably sensible people and let's face it, not everyone is."

"It's true."

"If I lived to be a thousand and for some reason couldn't spend that time sciencing I would...teach for a few centuries at least, write a novel, have at least a dozen children spaced out at no more than a few per century, start like ten different social justice groups, learn every language that exists..."

"I've been informed by a mermaid that octopi and dolphins are people, which, if I can confirm, would definitely be a project to handle in some sensible way."

"...We have octupi and dolphins in my world! I will definitely check to see if they're people."

"And possibly other sea creatures - I wrote it down but I don't have that notebook with me."

"Got it. Class trip to the aquarium in the near future. Good to know."

"...To the what?"

"...It is a place with simulated habitats for sea creatures so people can go look at them and learn about them."

"I don't think we have those. At least not in quantity. I'm going to have to get on a boat to check the dolphins thing. Water breathing spell and an armed escort to check the octopus claim."

"Yeah, you probably don't, they're mostly a science thing come to think of it."

"You have a lot of those."

"Yes, that's what happens when you don't get squished for it. The lovely thing about science is that the more you know, the more you can find out."

"You're making me more jealous than I was already. When I was a kid my mother caught me doing experiments on the television and she gave it to a neighbor and made me read a book about people getting squished."

"...I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make it worse. I have, um, a temper. And I tend to get catty at people who are being jerks about things and your universe is a jerk about things but being catty to you about your universe is. Unhelpful."

"A bit."

"In my defense, normally when a situation like this comes up the people I'm making snide remarks to don't have to live with what I'm making snide remarks about. But--yeah, now that I've noticed I'm doing that I can stop."

"Thank you. Anything else you're curious about?"

"Well, I'd say no, but it occurs to me that I don't know exactly what things you have in your universe that aren't fictional in mine, if you've had the telepathy to notice it for longer. Do you know if humanity's closest relatives--chimps and gorillas and such--are people?"

"...Humanity's whats?"

"...The species that are most similar to humanity," Edie says, not wanting to try to explain taxonomy at this point.

"...If you don't have elves or anything, uh, okay, sure, chimps and gorillas. Not people."

"Right, we don't have elves, of course those would be more similar. Sorry, still defaulting to my original paradigm."

"Anyway, I'm sure subtle artists have been in range of chimps and gorillas before and they are not people. Not that we're invariably great about finding new kinds of people, but we don't treat chimps and goblins like we treat goblins and kobolds."

"Judging by the fact that the legends attached to those words do not exactly inspire positive connotations I'm going to guess not well."

"Not great, no. There are some at my school, it's not perpetually awful, but not great."

"...Say, do you want some reasons not to be jealous of my world? Because I could tell you stories about how people treat each other here that do not inspire jealousy."

"I might just be able to match you."

"Here's the dark side of science: About three and a half decades ago, a country called Germany decided to round up all its 'undesirables'--the disabled, homosexuals, Romani and especially Jewish people--and sent them to death camps. They were forced to stand in showers where poisonous chemicals were piped through instead of water, and those that weren't murdered instantly were worked to death. The guards could kill any prisoner they wanted and no one would say a word against it. They were given just enough food that their starvation lasted weeks or months or years instead of days. Many of them were subjected to horrific experiments. Many suffered from diseases that were horribly lethal but fantastically preventable, if anyone had cared to prevent them. Millions died within the span of a few years."

"The red dragon known as the Bloodletter conquered the entire Confederation of the Wheat Valley with an army of enslaved lizardfolk. She lived on an almost exclusively sapient diet for somewhere between seven and eight hundred years, waged a relentless war against the nearby subterranean elves and recreationally tortured her prisoners of war; eventually the war ended because the remaining elves committed mass ritual suicide in an attempt to power some kind of ritual that ultimately failed. She is believed to have sold several thousand humans to demons and some part-demons in order to secure their help as enforcers and bogeymen. To prevent escape of her subjects from the Valley she kept everyone on short rations and controlled the press and public culture sufficiently well to spread misinformation about fey etiquette and foreign religions, such that anyone who fled into the areas beyond her domain would likely offend a fairy and anyone who managed to get out without meeting one would wind up executed or smitten for blasphemy. The misinformation was so pervasive that even after an adventuring party managed to kill her the entire valley has been at an enormous disadvantage trying to get their education into shape."

"I'm not sure, but I think mine might be worse. Not that I'm entirely objective on the subject--my Dad's a Holocaust survivor, and I haven't always had perfect control over my telepathy."

"Someone did kill her eventually and then some paladins cleared out most of the demons who lingered after that. And even eating a few people every day for eight hundred years doesn't actually add up to millions dead - I guess it's arguable whether spreading it out is better or not."

"Yeah. On the other hand, getting into dick measuring contests over whose atrocity is worse is probably less relevant than the fact that they happened at all."

"Yeah."

"I'm not nearly that close to the Bloodletter's reign. I sat in on a therapy session for a lizardfolk from the Valley once, otherwise it's just history class."

"I hope he does okay."

"He hatched after it was over, but there's lingering - stuff - and students get free access to the services, so."

"Makes sense. I've never had therapy about it--come to think of it, I don't think Dad's ever had therapy about it, he's...not the type."

"No?"

"He's the kind of hurt by the experience where he's...prickly. He wouldn't trust a stranger to psychoanalyze him. And God knows I love Papa, but he's not exactly a therapist."

"Well, it's common knowledge that if the patient doesn't want to be in therapy doing anything - at least anything ethical - is an extremely uphill climb, so that's up to him."

"He's doing okay, anyway, and I would know. He...did eventually hunt down and kill the particular man who murdered Grandmother, which I'm not saying was the wisest thing ever but probably helped in the long run."

Nod.

"Especially since the man was trying to start another atrocity. Honestly, the things some people will do. Actually, stopping him was how my parents met."

"Very adventuring-party-serial, that."

"I did say weird things happened to my family."

"Sounds kind of epic-level."

"Well. Papa is actually the strongest telepath we've found so far."

"That is exactly the sort of thing that on my world leads you to get into fights with equally epic villains and attract strange happenings."

"Dad actually almost went supervillain immediately after vengeance was achieved? And he has a telepathy-impermeable helmet, so it would have been a pretty decent match."

"If he had a telepathy-impermeable helmet why wouldn't he just win immediately, was your papa prone to telepathically dominating third parties with other powers or something?"

"No, but they had allies, and almost all of them sided with Papa when the two had their huge fight and Dad stormed off for a few months. He's immune to telepathy with that thing on, but not plasma blasts or screams that can shatter glass or anything like that."

"Gotcha. Well, mostly, I don't know what a plasma blast is."

"Extremely dangerous, which is the relevant bit. Anyway, when it became apparent that Emily--my sister--and I existed...I'm not one of those idiot who claim babies fix everything, but it did necessitate them being in a room together that they were forced to actually discuss their problems with each other like grown ups."

"That's good then."

"Yeah. I don't really like to think about what would have happened if they hadn't."

"Makes sense. ...Hey, in some science fantasy settings there aren't any gods around, what about your world?"

"We...don't really have any proof either way. We have religion--I'm moderately religious--but we can't really prove it."

"...So on the one hand no divine magic but on the other hand you don't get hit by lightning if you mispronounce a god's name during a storm?"

"Actually, my God's name is nothing but consonants. You're literally not supposed to say it at all. You just call him 'God' or 'The Lord'. But you don't get struck by lightning if you try anyway, no."

"I mean, that's not really consistent and divine healers save more people than gods personally kill, but I do consider smiting to be a drawback of the system."

"No smiting, no. Sometimes people blame him for unpleasant coincidences--usually when they happen to people the blamer doesn't like so that they can claim God is on their side, but those people are mostly just jerks."

"Ha. That happens in our world too. Usually it's Khersians."

"...The largest religious majority in my country right now is called the Christians. That's an interesting phonetic coincidence."

"Do they worship a god named Khersis?"

"No, it's a little complicated, but their religion is actually an offshoot of mine characterized by their belief that Yeshua ben Yusuf who lived a couple of millenia ago was the Son of God. There was this prophesy about a messiah that he think he fits, and the Greek word for messiah is Christ, so they're called the Christians because they believe that he was the Big Chosen One, basically."

"That's... pretty different from religions where I'm from."

"I think I'm missing a lot of the salient details, the most interaction with the religion I've really had is celebrating the secular version of their big winter holiday."

"There's secular Khersentide too."

"I assume that's their winter holiday?"

"Solstice, yeah. When Khersis was incarnated a lot of events in his life happened on or around it so that's when the Feast of Khersen is."

"Jesus--the form of Yeshua most people use nowadays--was supposedly the incarnate form of God as well as his son. I'm not totally sure how that works, something about God having multiple parts or something--and Christmas--the winter holiday--is supposedly the day he was born."

"I can't remember if Khersis's mortal incarnation was born on Khersentide or if that's when he died or what, I'm not really Khersian. Or anything, really."

"There's a whole 'nother holiday about Jesus dying, it's almost as heavily commercialized as Christmas. So...how do gods work in your world? I mean, you heavily implied that they exist...does not being anything really mean that you just don't favor any particular one or something? I think in my universe people who say that are atheists or agnostic mostly."

"I'm not an atheist, they exist, Mother Khaele was on television a few months ago insensitively commenting on a hurricane. I just don't... like... them."

"All things considered I think that's fair, especially if they go on television insensitively commenting on hurricanes."

"I'm a little reluctant to talk too much about it though because - I know this is a weird place, maybe nobody can hear me, but blasphemy is in the same category as conducting experiments."

"Aha. Okay, subject dropped. So, you mentioned having a television, those are pretty complicated technology in my world, how do yours work?"

"Magic. I don't know much about the details - it's an applied enchantment thing; I think the shows themselves are mostly handled with illusion-school stuff though."

"We don't have any kind of magic, unless you count mutant powers, which we don't, but by we I mean people like my immediate family, not absolutely everyone."

"I only have high school level magic plus a couple specialty college courses - Arcane Defense, intro elementalism for non-arcanists. Subtle arts is kind of a heavy major."

"I'm glad I don't have to get a specialized degree for my telepathy. I'm probably just going to major in education with a minor in something interesting."

"Once I have a day job doing therapy sorted out I might keep taking classes or just self-study in more arcane magic. I like it, it's just not the best way for me to pay rent - the field is booming but anybody who wants to can do it, while subtle artists are a limited supply."

"Makes sense. I'm lucky, mutants who happen to want to teach elementary and high school are in fairly short supply, I know it's going to be easy to get a job here when I've got my degree sorted."

"Lucky."

"Yeah. It's nice knowing what I'm going to do as an adult, Emily has no idea except 'maybe a doctor I guess'."

"A doctor?"

"You know how our therapists aren't telepaths? Our healers aren't magic."

"...How's that work? ...Druid healers use plants, sometimes? They also use magic but sometimes there are plants."

"There are things in the plants that are helpful and you can get them at higher concentrations to do more good than just the plants themselves. We've got something called aspirin that has the relevant stuff from willow bark in it. Stuff like that. And if you're very, very careful and your utensils are very, very clean, sometimes you can take a very diseased organ out of a body and stitch the whole thing closed to save the rest of the person."

"Wow. That's, uh, gross, but I guess if you don't have magic you have to do something."

"It's not as terrible as it sounds, I'm just--trying to avoid talking up science too much."

"Aha."

"So, my sister is considering Science Healer as a possible career, at least partly because a lot of their implements are made of metal and partly because, you know, healing. It is a helpful thing to do."

"Yeah. If I were... temperamentally suited to divine magic... I'd probably want to pick up at least a little healing knowhow. There exists arcane healing but it's much more obscure and advanced."

"That sucks, but therapy is a form of healing too."

"I know. This is kind of emphasized in my curriculum. But it is seldom a very dramatic form of healing because brute-forcing stuff in people's brains is almost never a good therapeutic decision."

"Oh god no, you can kill people like that."

"...I'd probably have to be trying to kill someone. They did teach me how to knock people out as a self-defense measure but it didn't count for a weapons policy exception so I took Arcane Defense anyway. Basic Knife is a joke."

"If you hit someone's mind too hard you can break it. I almost killed the person who carried me as a fetus because there was literally no barrier between their brain and my random baby emotional projections. Papa had to install one."

"...My mom and I did not have that problem, I'm naturally a pure-defense telepath, but even if I'm already extending myself into a mind I guess my oomph doesn't work the same way as yours? Like, I could mess someone up very badly by being careless but I don't think I could carelessly commit subtle-art murder."

"Well, it's never happened since then. No one's had to put any barriers between me and anyone else since I was born, I think it was just a feature of how my kind of telepathy interacts with pregnancy. It's hard to tell; we haven't seen a lot of cases quite like mine."

"Subtle arts vary a lot. I think some people pregnant with subtle artists have some mental contact, but I haven't actually heard of it being dangerous. I bet Professor Winters would know, though."

"That being one of your subtle arts teachers?"

"Yeah. She has more clinical experience than most of my others."

"I don't think it would be terribly relevant, considering how different our respective telepathies seem to be."

"Yeah, but I'm curious now." She pulls out a notebook and writes this down.

"Fair enough. So--you didn't seem terribly surprised that I have two fathers, is that something your magic does?"

"...No? I assumed at least one of them adopted you or failing that it was a science thing."

"Science thing. Ish. Mutant thing, specifically. I was just curious, since--magic."

"Nah. I assume if it were doable without unsafe levels of experimentation some elves would have figured it out before now."

"Makes sense. We were a complete accident, which is why I hesitate to label it a science thing."

"Science doesn't have accidents?"

"Science does have accidents, but I'm having trouble imagining an experiment that would produce babies by accident when it was trying to do something else."

"I wouldn't know."

"It's massively unlikely. Babies are complicated."

"Are they really?"

"Well--even fully-grown humans need a certain set of things to survive. Food, air, the right temperature so you don't freeze or roast. Childrens' needs are more finicky than that, and a baby that hasn't even been born yet has really extremely specific needs that are really hard to meet outside of a uterus. Having a completely unrelated experiment produce those exact conditions would be a hell of a coincidence."

"Oh, I see."

"I think I'm going to try the door again," she says after a moment, and gets up and walks toward the door.

No dice.

"It is pretty cozy. I wonder if the door will let me by." She goes up to the door. The door continues existing. She opens it; it is a dorm hallway. She closes it. "I'll stay and keep you company for a while though."

"Thanks, I appreciate it. Hm...the bar apparently sells arbitrary objects, is there something from home you'd like that's difficult to get where you are? That wouldn't be science."

"I don't exactly have a ton of money but I'm set for material comforts. I have a nice dorm room and I don't care much about clothes and I have boots that help me not fall over and the school library's great. That said, I am considering breaking a minor import regulation to go home with a case of foreign chocolate to covertly resell to hallmates."

"Chocolate's nice, there was some in the drink Bar recommended for me."

"My milkshake didn't have any, but chocolate is great and we have it in my world, so it's not all bad."

"Yeah. Your world sounds liveable, just annoying, or I'd be working harder to try to work something out evacuationwise."

"I'm not sure if anything with stomping feet would get mad about evacuating the world but it seems likely."

"Evacuating the entire world? Sure. Picking up a few people and spiriting them away? I can't imagine it's likely that a cosmic force that let you find Milliways in the first place would be mad about someone coming in and trying to persuade a few of your dormmates to move out."

"Yeah, probably."

"Every life matters. Even if you can't save everyone, saving anyone is better than no one."

"I know."

"Sorry, I can get a bit morbid sometimes. Thinking about people you can't save."

"Yeah, me too. And there aren't enough diamonds in the world to bring everybody back."

"Diamonds?"

"...Clerics can resurrect people but it requires a lot of diamonds to be destroyed as part of the spell. Also it doesn't work if you've died of old age."

"Oh, I see. Well, in my world we can't resurrect people at all, so..."

"That's worse. But it's not really common in my world either. If I walk off a warded path and get eaten by a ghoul my parents probably wouldn't be able to scrape together enough to get me back unless they manage to get enough attention to take up a collection."

"If we had resurrection that was just super expensive we probably could have gotten back Dad's parents, Papa's side of the family is actually super rich, it's convenient."

"There are like half a dozen reasons why we probably cannot or should not attempt to leverage this meeting in this bar into a resurrection for your grandparents," sighs the subtle artist. "...What is your name? I'm Bella."

"Oh! I'm Edie, pleased to meet you. Yeah, for one thing I doubt your magic could reach into my universe's afterlife, given how not-magic my universe is and how not-science yours is."

"Yeah. Oh well."

"Even if I could get them back, right now, it would still be terrible. My dad was a teenager when they died, and he's fifty now."

"I can see how that would be awkward. Usually if someone on my world is going to be resurrected at all there's a delay of a few years at most."

"I mean, I think it would still be better than not, but yeah."

"Yeah. Huh, if I stay in here much longer but not long enough to sleep I'm going to be too tired to go to the skirmish game, but I guess if that's the worst consequence of walking into an interplanar bar I got off pretty easy."

"If you want to go, go ahead, Bar can lend me books to pass the time. I wouldn't want to mess up your sleep cycle too much."

"My sleep cycle will be all right for another few hours, tomorrow's a weekend and skirmish usually runs late enough to keep me up anyway."

"All right. Oh, hey, are there any books that it would be difficult to get your hands on in your world? I'm pretty sure Bar just loans out books without charging as long as you don't remove them from the premises.:"

"The library really is very good. I don't currently know of any books I can't get my hands on at home. But if you're all out of things to ask about my world and Bar will do for company I can take a hint."

"I'm not exactly hinting, just trying to make small talk because I am indeed a bit out of things to ask about your world."

Bella slurps up the last dregs of her milkshake. The glass disappears. "I bet you don't have skirmish, with no magic, it would be a little too fatal."

"I don't know what skirmish is, but if you think so you're probably right."

"Simulated warfare. It only took off after the mockbox became common - that's a box you can put a weapon into to get an illusion version of it. Everything's the same except no one dies. I mean, unless a half-ogre punches them in the head, but that isn't very common. The team this year is a little too melee heavy for my tastes, though, I like watching more when it's more battlefield control and arcana."

"Oh, that does sound interesting. It sounds a bit like the Danger Room, come to think of it."

"Danger Room?"

"It's a room where we use science illusions to train combat-based applications of our powers, if that's something that interests us."

"Science illusions," giggles Bella. "Sounds fun. I'm not cut out for skirmish myself - I need magic boots just to walk down a hallway without tripping and a good skirmish team has someone to jam my knockout trick."

"Emily likes it more than I do, she's much more suited to running around hitting things than I am."

"I bet she'd cost a lot of points to field in skirmish."

"I don't know how skirmish works, but from context I bet you're right."

Giggle. "I think it costs extra to have a player whose skillset is really off the wall, and someone who controls metal would be that."

"Yeah, it's pretty great. And did I mention she can fly? And take passengers?"

"That would definitely contribute. Of course, if you have too high a point cost you're just kind of out there with four other people fighting forty opposing players, so..."

"My world's cheating?"

"Theoretical noping of our powers."

"Well, even if you went into the world and in local terms your sister counted as a weird elementalist and you counted as a subtle artist, a well-constructed skirmish full army would have a lot of tricks up their sleeves. You'd be jammed and tie up at most three of their guys, and somebody with flying shoes and good stealth would stab her or she'd think she'd blunt-traumaed a guy only to find that he didn't count as 'dead' and still had his sword or an archer with wood arrows that multiply midair would take her out."

"Wood arrows, okay. I'm not saying I'd bet we'd win, but I don't know enough about the system to say we'd lose. Doesn't matter, anyway, I'm not risking potential noping just to play a new game."

"Oh, yeah, definitely don't come to my world."

"I think sometimes Emily has fantasies about being pitted against a vast army of people in metal armor carrying swords and metal shields who haven't got a clue what she is until it's too late."

Bella giggles. "Modern warfare is not quite like that, but she could be a nasty surprise for some people before there were counters invented."

"It's not like that in our world either, although there is still a lot of metal involved."

"Metal's useful stuff."

"It really is, even when two of the people you love most in the world don't have fantastic power over it."

"How does she fly, just wear a lot of metal things and pick herself up by them?"

"Partly that, partly remember how I said our planet was a magnet?"

"Yeah?"

"She's not reliably good enough at this not to have to use the metal bit you guessed, but Dad can just push himself off the Earth's magnetic fields even if he's not wearing a speck of metal on his body."

"Huh. I'm tempted to turn your family into a science fantasy book back home."

"Go for it. I rather like the idea of being a fantasy novel heroine."

"I'm not actually a particularly good writer, but I can plot it out while lucid dreaming - can you do that? - and then put it on the ethernet."

"Not really. I can share dreams with someone, accidentally or on purpose, but that doesn't make me aware that it's a dream while I'm having it."

"Huh. Most subtle artists can learn to lucid dream - other people can too, but not as easily. I get my hubristic power fantasies out of the way so I can behave during the day."

"My inappropriate fantasies have less to do with pride and more with wrath, but yeah, that sounds convenient."

"Bar could loan you the book I used to learn, I assume, but I don't know if it would work the same for you even though I've been rounding you to 'subtle artist'."

"Well, I've never tried. Bar, may I see the book?"

The bar materializes a copy of Lucid Arts.

Edie flips through it. "Interesting. How much would this cost me if I wanted to bring it home?"

$8, but if you bring it out of the bar it will continue to be written in Pax and you will not have the ambient translation effect.

"Ah. And it's long enough that I really don't want to try to copy it out by hand. Oh well, I'll read it before I go home, I guess."

"Isn't it annoying that telepathy doesn't work on books? I know a tiny amount of Kharoline from school and a tinier amount of Elvish from being a nerd and that's it."

"Yeah. It's still better than television, though, at least my brain doesn't expect text to have a mind behind it. Television is just so...uncanny valley."

"Huh, I don't have that problem. Like, I can tell when there is a mind present, but it's a pretty minor sensation if that's all I'm getting, and it usually is. I don't miss it much."

"I mean, there are exceptions, Dad's anti-telepathy helmet makes him completely invisible and he doesn't bother me when he's wearing it because I'm used to it, but with most people it's the most obvious thing."

"Fair enough. I don't actually like TV much, but I'm pretty sure it's for other reasons. It moves too slow - I read fast."

"I suppose there's that too. I haven't investigated enough to know what else I would dislike about it."

"Are cartoons better? Stylized ones?"

"A little, but it's still...it's less creepy, but it still doesn't ping any of my 'I should care about this' triggers."

"Fair enough."

"I actually do get a little vicarious enjoyment out of a few shows from Emily, but I suspect the act of observing a story in someone else's brain is rather different from actually watching television."

"Probably. I haven't tried it myself though."

"It helps that I have someone who has zero objections to having her mind read. I have other people who will let me in reasonably often but I have standing permission to poke around in Emily's head whenever I want."

"Sounds - relaxing."

"That's one word for it. And it's reciprocal--if she wants something from my head, I give it to her."

"Which is fair, but I wouldn't manage well in a relationship like that. It's sort of incorrect to claim there's a reason I'm so defense-oriented, but however it happened it really suits me to be a hard nut to crack."

"I didn't realize your shielding was anything other than your own intent, so it doesn't surprise me that you would object to that. That *is* why I'm talking out loud."

"I can let stuff through and have mental conversations, but I screen it before I do, and I almost literally can't let someone through to look at anything I'm not sending. It would be like trying to let them poke me in the eye."

"I'm actually sort of vaguely curious whether I could do it anyway, but not curious enough to forget that I have ethics."

"I can be brute forced, it's been done to get a good estimate of my strength, I don't know if you could do it or not."

"Are you okay? Brute forcing my kind of shields usually is really unpleasant for the person being brute forced."

"I agreed to the test. And now I know approximately who I should never get into telepathic fights with, to a fuzzy approximation. It wasn't fun but I was okay."

"I'm glad. I know just from mutual poking and stuff that I'm a little better than Papa was at my age, but I think most of that's the effect of having had an older telepath to learn from. I'm stronger than Sophie, on about the same level as Jean..."

"On a loose ten point scale I'm a four overall, nine defensively. Ten is the really big leagues, but I only approach it in one totally passive ability so even if I didn't have moral objections to it I couldn't go be a dungeon delver on my subtle arts ability alone."

"What's a dungeon delver?"

"Uncharitably? People who are good at violence and like conducting home invasions as long as the homes are underground or in poor repair and inhabited by nonhumans."

"...I'm not sure I see any reason to be charitable, there."

"Sometimes the nonhumans in the poorly-repaired and/or underground residences are legitimate threats to nearby people, it can be sort of hard to sort out who started that sort of conflict, and if I have to guess who started it I will tend to go with the population who would try to eat me given the opportunity. Dungeon delving is also how a lot of major heroes get good enough at what they do to do things like slay the Bloodletter."

"Okay, that sounds like 'the kind of thing that is a good idea in theory, but requires way better oversight'."

"And the oversight is terrible, but it's getting better as we learn more about other kinds of people - with occasional setbacks when we learn that, yes, ogres really do enjoy the taste of human flesh when they're back home and they're just politely indulging local ordinance."

"Better than not, I suppose. And I...can't say I approve of any amount of consumption of sentient beings, but I'm also not going to start looking accusitorily at people because I think their reasons for not doing terrible things aren't good enough."

"Oh, yeah, I don't care why they're temporarily not eating people except for the implications of 'temporarily'."