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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
whatamithinking
"Ugh. Fine, since you're the one holding the door I won't make the time you'd have to do it in longer by going after them, but if they happen to get in my way I don't promise to hold back any more than 'no brainwashing.'"
iamnotpolaris
"Don't you think I should be making promises or not, given that I'm the no brainwashing option? But yeah, no going after the Nazis, no matter how tempting it is."
thinkering
"I mean, if Nazis attack you, make them eat asphalt or forget how to walk or whatever," says Lorica. "That's an occupational hazard they deal with anyway, occasionally attacking people who can fight back at a higher level. But don't hunt them down at home. I'm sure I can find you enough kill-order threats to turn your stomach if you - where will the door lead?"
To the same place whence you came.
"So my workshop, if one of you brings me my computer I can look up where to find all sorts of troubling targets, but do mind you're absolutely taking your lives into your hands - I can brief you based on public information but there's always gaps and someone may be able to directly counter or route around you."
To the same place whence you came.
"So my workshop, if one of you brings me my computer I can look up where to find all sorts of troubling targets, but do mind you're absolutely taking your lives into your hands - I can brief you based on public information but there's always gaps and someone may be able to directly counter or route around you."
whatamithinking
"It's just Nazis are a little more personal for me. And I did say I wouldn't go out of my way to attack them."
thinkering
"Yeah. So I'll hold the door and you can run and get me my computer and -"
Lorica approaches the door. It disappears.
"What kind of Shaker bullshit is this place pulling now?"
Lorica approaches the door. It disappears.
"What kind of Shaker bullshit is this place pulling now?"
iamnotpolaris
"Sometimes Milliways decides to deprive people of doors for arbitrary lengths of time, no more than two days apparently, but within that period pretty arbitrary."
thinkering
"I mean, I was planning to camp out anyway, but if it keeps me that long there goes the fantasy of you making all the S9 members march themselves to the Birdcage unless you want to wait too."
thinkering
"The Slaughterhouse Nine? Well, nobody's figured out how to save Gray Boy's victims, yet, they're in time-looped eternal torture. Another supervillain eventually killed him."
iamnotpolaris
"My magnetism is...really, really strong, actually, and my sister is a fuckoff powerful telepath, so yeah, we can probably clean up more than just this one group if you do have a list."
thinkering
"There's an entire condemned city where Nilbog was quarantined... I'm curious to know if you could, but terrified to suggest, that you could try some telepathy on the Simurgh quarantine zones. You won't convince anyone to unquarantine them and I don't know if she leaves telepathically visible marks, but if you could find out what exactly happened to the people inside... There's a Simurgh victim on the S9, too, you wouldn't necessarily have to detour to the quarantines."
thinkering
"Goes by Mannequin. Tinker. Used to be working on self-contained environments with a view to space colonization. Simurgh killed his family and drove him insane."
"I am simultaneously impressed and appalled by how much higher stakes your world's superscene is compared to ours," Marie says.
thinkering
"I do have days where I just sit in my workshop for hours, programming robots to do my homework and working on my dad's suit, but yeah, sounds like you've got various flavors of idyll."
whatamithinking
"Multiversal evidence actually suggests that my world narrowly dodged a highly martial civil rights movement that might or might not have ended in genocide robots. I mean, we still sort of ended up with the movement, but it was significantly less necessary, and we're pretty sure the robots have been comprehensively averted."
iamnotpolaris
"She intended to emphasize 'averted' more than she ended up doing. Apparently most of the worlds of our type at least see the robots coming into existence, even if they never reach the genocide stage."
thinkering
"We don't have any of those in particular that I've heard of, but there's a lot to keep track of even for people who follow cape events really closely. Tinkers all have specialties, and robots aren't that common when you could also get, say, guns, or plants, or software, or musical instruments, or weird vaguely alchemical products of common kitchen ingredients."