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Bella finds it.
"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."
"You c'mere. Easier for you."
"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."
"Okay, fine, where are you?"
"Garage."
So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.
"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."
"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."
"Do you think it's safe?"
"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."
"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.
Nothing happens.
The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.
point_b
iamnotpolaris
"Milliways pauses time in your homeworld while you're here, so when we go back we won't have missed anything. And we owed this guy a favor, so he asked us to fill in on his team for a while while he got someone else who would fill a similar role. And I get doors pretty often, so it's not too massive a risk."
iamnotpolaris
"I know, right? I get fruity beverages made of fruits that don't exist in my homeworld, it's fantastic."
iamnotpolaris
"We're not totally frivolous! We bring home fantastic medical technology to have reverse engineered."
point_b
"Weird limitation."
Objects made with engineering are merely a matter of arranging matter correctly. I lack the qualifications to perform any kind of magic beyond what I use to create things at all, sense my environment, and think.
Objects made with engineering are merely a matter of arranging matter correctly. I lack the qualifications to perform any kind of magic beyond what I use to create things at all, sense my environment, and think.
iamnotpolaris
"She also won't give you weapons--as I referenced when we first came in--living things, or anything bigger than her."
point_b
These limitations are more regulatory.
"I see. And anybody lucky enough to find you has just encountered El Dorado...?"
After the first beverage I do charge reasonable currency-dependent prices.
"Gotcha."
"I see. And anybody lucky enough to find you has just encountered El Dorado...?"
After the first beverage I do charge reasonable currency-dependent prices.
"Gotcha."
iamnotpolaris
"Also if you get up to the kind of behavior the Conquistadores were so fond of she has a security team guaranteed to be a match for whoever's in the bar at the moment."
point_b
"Weird." Bella sits at the bar. "I will try my own drink recommendation, thank you."
Her drink recommendation is hot chocolate. With whipped cream.
"So, we don't do secret identities, but we do code names. I'm Flicker and she's Verge."
Her drink recommendation is hot chocolate. With whipped cream.
"So, we don't do secret identities, but we do code names. I'm Flicker and she's Verge."
whatamithinking
"To be fair, we've used a lot of different names over the years, and it was our aunt who named Dad. ...Aunt on the other side of the family, Dad's an only child."
point_b
"Fair enough. My name was a Junebug selection, I think they probably have someone on staff whose mission in life is naming teenage gemini."
whatamithinking
"I mean, she labeled our other parent Professor X, they're a telepath like me, it wasn't only power based."
point_b
"Our names are usually connected to our bonuses in some way. Powers tend not to be exact duplicates, which helps, but there are other teleporters and I'm lucky there was something as mellifluous as 'Flicker' free when we had our birthday."