"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.
"Dragon me didn't have magnetism, alas, apparently telepathy is an option for that kind of dragon but magnetism isn't."
"Okay. I might be able to make it so it doesn't use them at all and just powers the diamonds mode with the annihilation mode but we'll see."
"I'm building a device that will convert unwanted ash into energy and diamonds, enthusiasm is hardly misplaced."
"Yeah, fair enough. I like my power, though. It's really convenient! It just hasn't come up since I've been in a single room since coming here."
A shimmering, glowing barrier appears in the air. "I can make planar barriers that give off light. They can be any shape I want, so long as it's two dimensional, and I can make plenty at once, so I could make almost any polyhedron, but nothing with curves." The barrier vanishes, and one shaped like a star and a glowing dodecahedron appear. "They're not quite invulnerable, but close. They're useful for platforms to stand on in midair, and shields, but also putting out fires and obstructing movement."
"Like, it's not as strong, and--If I were to, say, take an apple, and put a thin barrier to bisect it, the top and bottom halves wouldn't come off, the barrier and the apple would be sort of coexisting. And then when I dismissed the barrier the structural integrity of the apple where it had been would be severely compromised, but it wouldn't be cut."