Thataway is... a man in a tweed suit. He looks about forty, he's sitting in a nicely upholstered armchair in the middle of the forest, and he's got a book in his hand entitled WE COME IN PEACE.

What he doesn't have is a mind - not one of his own, at least. He's the extension, the projection of a mind. A big one.

"Nice night for a hike," the projection says, glancing up from his obviously fake reading.

"...Well, you know, haven't been killed by Sentinels yet, that's the most important facet of any night." 

He raises an eyebrow. "I'm happy to hear it. What in God's green Hell is a Sentinel?"

"The...murder robots that have been making the United States uninhabitable for the past ten years? ...Do they call them something else here? Are we in--Canada, Europe, somewhere safe?"

"You're in Massachusetts. A Massachusetts notably devoid of murder robots." He considers. "Usually, at least, you do get the occasional Devisor with bright ideas - but I'm getting off-topic. You're saying that your Earth's America had some kind of robot apocalypse, and everyone else just sort of - let it? Do they not have superheroes?"

"The robots were--I don't know how but they were made to adapt to any mutant ability used on them. They took down our strongest four years ago." 

He inhales sharply. "That's... not good. Ah, I think I've established to my satisfaction that you're not here for the express purpose of destroying my place of employment - would you like to continue this discussion somewhere with walls?"

"Okay. Where?"

The man holds up a map, which was not in his hands a second ago. "You're south of campus, currently. Just continue in the direction you were going - head for the first building you see, then go down the stairs to the basement and we can meet in person."

"Okay." 

Emily picks Edie up and zooms in that direction. 

The first building they see has a sign out front reading HAWTHORNE COTTAGE. As they approach, the door is opened by a blonde woman in a pantsuit, whose mind is unreadable due to an impenetrable aura of bright blue light.

"Good evening," she says. "I'm Headmistress Elizabeth Carson. I'll take you to Louis's room, we can talk there."

"...Thanks." 

She leads them downstairs to... what looks like an indoor swimming pool. In an armchair by the pool sits the man they met before in the forest, reading another book called FIRST IMPRESSIONS; in the pool is a horrible, horrible monster. It has many tentacles, but also an enormous quantity of other features that make much less sense. Horns, wings, hooves, teeth- lots of teeth. Generally, it looks like something that shouldn't exist.

The monster is clearly the "source" of the man in the chair, to Edie's mental senses. Its mind is enormous, and, oddly, almost completely unshielded - there's something towards the bottom that's locked away tight, but other than that it's an open book.

The man in the chair, and the monster, look up as they enter. "Hello," the man says. "Glad you found your way over."

"Hi. What are hooves useful for underwater?"

"You know, it's an interesting question. I believe the entity which originally held this form could shapeshift, so it had hooves when it was on land and wings in the air and tentacles underwater. I can't volitionally shapeshift, though, I'm just an Exemplar - so when my body decided to emulate that entity, it decided to go for the best of those three worlds at once, without considering whether it made sense to do so."

"Oh. What's an Exemplar?"

"One of the fundamental categories of mutant, in our world. Exemplars take on a form they perceive as 'ideal', and they gain enhanced physical and mental capabilities with it. I started out as a fairly typical example of the category - tall, handsome, et cetera - but I unwisely made telepathic contact with an entity from outside our reality, and my body image template was warped to match its own." The man in the chair gestures to the monster. "I've come to terms with it, over the years."

"Oh. That's weird. I don't think I've ever encountered a mutant like that before. We have people who have physical changes, but they're pretty much uncorrelated with what someone would look like if they got to pick, and we have voluntary shapeshifters who can look however they want, but nothing like that." 

"Oh? Perhaps we're working from a different mutation, then... or perhaps your world simply doesn't have a way of connecting to the extradimensional body image template..."

Mrs. Carson clears her throat. "Priorities, Louis."

"I think it's something of a priority to find out if we're even the same kind of mutant," Louis (apparently) says mildly.

"...Up close, you feel kind of different. More like my kind of mutant than like a baseline, but..."

"Hmm. I don't seem to have the same kind of synaesthetic senses that you do with my telepathy; mutants and humans feel roughly the same, though I can tell an Exemplar from a baseline easily. If you say we feel different, then that's some evidence in that direction. Does your type of mutant have mutations along the meta-gene complex? Or, well, you might call it something different, but - approximately eighteen distinct locations in the genome which are different between mutants and baselines?"

"...No, we have one recessive gene which when expressed activates a set of otherwise-junk DNA that has the same variance curves between mutants and baselines. How can you have eighteen distinct places where a binary set differs, what happens when they intermarry?"

"Fascinating. As I understand it, the meta-gene complex is rather stubbornly binary - you either have it or you don't. The children of mixed marriages either have it or don't. It also crops up randomly in populations without any members who have it. I'm not a biologist, but it really doesn't seem to add up, does it?"

"It really doesn't. I could buy the first part if they were all adjacent on the same chromosome, although I'd be skeptical that there was literally zero crossover, but...I mean, we have mutants born to baseline parents but that's because it's recessive."

"I believe the going theory is that there's some kind of ambient magic at work mutating those areas specifically, though that has its own problems."

Mrs. Carson clears her throat. "I believe we were going to discuss some kind of killer robot apocalypse?"

"Yes, that too," Louis says. "These Sentinels - you say they adapt to any mutant powers used against them. Are they magic-resistant as well?"

"Until today I was not aware that magic was a thing that actually existed." 

Louis raises his eyebrows. "And you expect you would know about it if it did - very interesting. Magic definitely exists in our world. This school actually teaches it, among other subjects."

"We could destroy them."

"Edie's probably the strongest telepath left alive, from our world, unless someone even stronger cropped up outside the States since communications went dark."

Louis nods. "In an odd coincidence, I'm the most powerful telepath in our world - but I'm confined to a swimming pool, so I'm unlikely to be relevant to any campaign against the killer robots. Is there someone in control of these Sentinels?"

"Not anymore. They were supposed to just wipe out the mutants and mutant-sympathizers but, uh, whoever programmed them didn't do a good enough job of defining the latter."

Mrs. Carson looks disgusted. "Not just bastards but incompetent bastards."

"Are the Sentinels sapient?" Louis asks.

"I've never felt a mind off them but considering their adaptiveness that's not proof. I think probably they wouldn't have wiped out their creators if they had any kind of judgment, though."

"You're probably right," he says. "Alright, then. I'll want to know their capabilities - would you mind transmitting that information telepathically, so that we don't miss anything by relying on language?"

"Of course not." 

She lowers her shields completely, and thinks back on every encounter, every fact about the damn things she's ever learned. 

Louis goes in.

It's an odd sensation - in observing her thoughts, he sifts through them like sand. It's possible someone who wasn't so attuned to her own mind wouldn't notice, but to her it's really obvious. It only takes him a few seconds to find what he's looking for, and he scans through the memories rapidly. "Thank you," he says when he's done. "You should raise your shields again, unless you're comfortable with me getting your surface thoughts; I can't help reading people who are near me."

She raises her shields. "That felt odd."

"It's distinctive, isn't it? Skilled psychics can make it feel like nothing, but in psychic circles it's considered polite to make it obvious when you're in someone's mind."

"It felt different than the telepaths back home do. And even if they can go unnoticed by people who aren't themselves telepaths that doesn't necessarily mean I can't tell."

He nods. "Would you like to test it? I'm the most powerful psychic in the world, as far as I know."

"Sure. Might as well see if you can get through my shields, too."

"Alright."

Shields go up around his mental presence.

Her own shields flicker for a split second, and then there's a faint feeling of - well, of having her thoughts read. Not everything feels like something else.

"That was--weirdly ghostly--but I definitely felt it."

He withdraws. "Good to know. Your shields are very strong, I don't think there's many people besides me who could get through them."

"Good. 

"My dad was the strongest telepath in our world, before the Sentinels got him."

"I saw. I'm sorry for your loss."

Nod. 

Hug. 

"I do magnetism. Like our other parent."

Mrs. Carson clears her throat. "Well, given that you're superpowered individuals without anywhere else in this world to go, even if you're not strictly speaking our kind of mutants, Whateley Academy will be willing to provide you with room and board while we work out what to do about your own world."

"Thanks? Uh. What does that...entail."

"It would be easiest to handle it as a scholarship, which would involve you attending classes and staying in one of the dormitory cottages. We'll be looking for backers who can fund a scouting mission to your world, so we know if the forces we need to send to destroy these Sentinels look more like a high-powered superteam or a mercenary company or the United States army."

"Alright. Uh, we haven't had any formal schooling since this started, when we were six."

She nods. "We can work with that - we get students from places without a lot of formal schooling pretty regularly. So, for educational core requirements we'll have you in remedial tutoring, but for other classes, like art or magic or-" She breaks off. "Well. Usually we require that students go through basic martial arts training and Combat Finals, which are a nonlethal combat placement test at the end of each semester; will either of those be a problem, given your personal history?"

"No. Fighting humans is very different than fighting Sentinels."

"That makes sense. Then as I was saying, for other classes like art or magic or martial arts, you shouldn't be at any disadvantage. There's a bit of paperwork before we get you settled, which I can help you fill out. Shall we leave Louis's room and repair to my office?"

"Yeah, okay." 

Mrs. Carson removes a silver rod from her pocket. There's a shower of blue sparks, and they're suddenly standing in a nicely appointed office dominated by a mahogany desk. Mrs. Carson sits in an office chair behind the desk and gestures to a handful of seats opposite. She then removes a stapled packet of papers from the desk and starts going over them with a pen. "Don't need that... hmm, no... alright."

She slides the papers over to the twins. "Just fill those out, and feel free to ask me about any questions that confuse you."

The forms contain some relatively standard questions (home address [which has been crossed out], blood type, age, and gender [with a wide variety of options]), and less standard questions (tentative power ratings, GSD/BIT/MATD irregularities, age of manifestation, sexuality). It's not very long, but it is a bit dense.

"What do we put for gender if we're--genetically and socially and externally women but, uh, the phrase we used back home was 'discreet hermaphrodite'."

"If you feel most comfortable identifying as female, that's what you should put. If you feel that you would be better served by an environment containing students of varying gender identities, you can check 'other' as well, it's non-exclusive."

"I'm a girl. --And my dads were men. But it seems, uh, medically relevant, is there somewhere else to mention it if not here."

"Naturally you're female, I didn't mean to imply otherwise, just that it's a special enough situation that you might want the extra support. The information will be noted and included in medical records when you have your first check-up."

"I didn't think you were, I thought it was worth clarifying because if I had had weird in-between genderfeelings that doesn't mean I wouldn't socially present as a woman in most contexts. It's not something that's a huge deal in the context I'm used to, like, even aside from how nothing was a big deal that didn't have direct survival implications discreet hermaphroditism is a really common mutant trait in our world. We never got a huge statistical sample but, I dunno, somewhere between a sixth and half?"

"Hmm. We have a similar but not identical statistic, where about five percent of mutants in our world, mostly Exemplars, gradually change sex. Almost all such 'changelings', as some of them call themselves, find themselves comfortable with the change, even if they would not have identified as transgender before. We also have mutants who end up intersex or sexless, but not at nearly such a common rate."

"Do you get changes of people who don't realize they're fertile in one direction or the other, because we and a friend were accidents of the 'how is that even possible' variety."

"Fertility is practically guaranteed in cases of Exemplar sex change, but only in the conventional direction once the change is complete. We as in Whateley do not have problems of the 'I didn't know I was still fertile' variety - thank God - due to an anti-conception ward placed on the campus by one of my predecessors."

"Convenient. Anyway, our parents were both grown-ass adults who loved each other, the only thing wrong with our birth was, uh, what happened six years later but that didn't have anything to do with the accidentalness." Oh look forms. She fills out forms. She does not actually know her blood type, it didn't super come up, also there's no guarantee she won't have a weird mutant blood type or anything given how every other facet of mutant biology seems to have the potential for weird mutant versions. 

Neither of them has any idea what "GSD/BIT/MATD" mean. 

Age of manifestation: -5 months.

Tentative power ratings: They have no idea what the scale is, here. 

Sexuality: Bi-leaning-dudes

Sexuality: straight

Age: 16

Mrs. Carson looks over the forms. "Oh, sorry - the alphabet soup category, GSD-BIT-MATD is for any changes your mutation has made to your biology, such as fur or scales or in one particularly memorable case turning into a sentient cloud of nerve gas. Tentative power ratings, Louis is telling me PSI-6 for Edie and we'll get Emily in for power testing at the first opportunity, it's not terribly important anyway. As far as sexuality and gender goes, we'll need a verdict on whether you'd rather both be in the cottage for LGBT students or both be in one of the standard women's cottages. Ordinarily we'd separate you, but that seems like a bad idea here."

Immediate sister-arm-hug. "Very bad idea," she agrees.

"Yes, it does seem that way. So, where would you rather be placed?"

The two share a look that is above-average telepathic even for twins on account of literal telepathy. 

"...LGBT cottage. It'd be weird and uncomfortable if someone wasn't okay with our dads." 

"Very reasonable. Poe it is, then."

She types rapidly on a sleek black computer, and there's the sound of a printer printing from outside the room. "On the printer just outside will be your ID cards, which will let you into the cottage. System says there's an unoccupied room on the first floor, room 115. In the morning I'll call Professor Dresden, he's Poe's housefather, and let him know your situation, and he or one of his residents will give you the welcome tour."

"Okay, cool." 

Edie walks out to grab the IDs. 

There is shortly a yelp of "TWO THOUSAND AND TWELVE!?"

Mrs. Carson looks surprised. "Two thousand and twelve," she agrees. "Is that a discontinuity?"

"Last we knew it was nineteen eighty."

"...ah. Well, it is currently 2012. September twenty-seventh, more specifically."

"Well, that makes sense of the weird technology." 

"It's also partly a consequence of having Gadgeteers around; their mutation is a kind of instinctual understanding of technology, and their inventions are often, though not always, reproducible by baselines. Most industries have been kickstarted to some extent by Gadgeteer innovations."

"Oh I was already assuming that part. We had this one guy, Dr. McCoy, back home, back before everything."

"Well, anyway, it is 2012. You might be happy to hear that, if your society was anything like ours, social issues have advanced considerably in the absence of killer robots. Gay marriage is legal and everything."

"--What, really?"

"Yes! In many states, at least - Massachusetts, where we are now, was the first, but several have followed suit, and there's cases in the supreme courts just about everywhere. It's quite exciting."

"That's so cool! How are mutant rights?"

"We're not what you'd call universally beloved, which is a large part of why Whateley Academy is still kept mostly secret, but it's certainly better than it was even a few years ago. Mutants are acknowledged to have rights, and you don't hear nearly as much about the pitchfork-wielding mobs. At least in the States."

"...Secret? --I guess that might've been a good idea.' 

"Even with the secrecy, there have been incidents. Most of the population may have gotten with the program, but it only takes a handful of baselines with assault rifles to cause a serious problem. But there hasn't been a major incident of that sort since Halloween of 2006."

"What happened Halloween of 2006?"

She looks slightly haunted. "A full-scale invasion of the campus by the supervillain Deathlist and his private army, the Tiger Guard, during the annual Halloween Ball. There were only three deaths on our side, but it was extremely traumatic for everyone involved."

She pinches her nose. "...Why."

"There was a particular team of students who had thwarted a plan of his, during a trip to Boston, and he wanted revenge. After the Halloween Invasion, his power structures were systematically dismantled by a coalition of superheroes and supervillains who had attended Whateley and did not appreciate his threatening their alma mater, and the man himself was in Detroit when the city was destroyed, so he's presumed dead."

"What happened to Detroit?"

"There was a coalescence of ley lines, which drew a large number of superheroes and villains to Detroit hoping to claim untold power for themselves, but during the peak of the event, the city and its environs simply... ceased to exist. A perfect sphere was carved out of the ground. No one knows why; the event was claimed by a handful of terrorist groups and supervillains, but not plausibly. The going hypothesis is that whoever was responsible was consumed along with the city."

"...Wow. How, uh, often does the ley lines thing happen?"

"This was the first time in five hundred years; the next isn't scheduled for another six centuries."

"What happened five hundred years ago?"

"That one occurred in what is now Nigeria; the power of the ley lines was claimed by a local king, Omotayo, who established a fairly substantial empire with the power it granted him before being assassinated by his wife. Why?"

"Trying to figure out if the Detroit thing is typical."

"It wasn't. It was, by all accounts, unique in all of recorded history."

"In what way? The spherical disappearance?"

"Yes. There have been devises that accomplish that kind of vanishing effect on a smaller scale, but the kind of power that would have been required for something like Detroit is really beyond the pale."

"...Wow."

"Indeed. Is there anything else?"

"I think we're alright. Thank you."

"Then I wish you all the best at Whateley. And I'll keep you updated on our progress in the search for backers, of course."

Nodnod. 

They head for Poe. 

There's campus maps in a convenient bin by the door of the office. Poe is easy to locate, and if they swipe their ID cards they can go in and find their room.

It's big, for a dorm room. Two lofted beds, a desk under each, a sink in the corner.

The two of them consider the situation and crawl into one of the beds together, shielded by a barrier of magnetically-shaped metal. 

Zzzzzzz. 

Some hours later, there's a knock at the door.

After some tense aaaaaah-are-we-under-attack-no-wait, Emily gets up and opens the door. 

She doesn't look great, not having had consistent access to soap or hairbrushes or spare clothes for a while. 

"Hi! I'm Professor Harry Dresden. Um, I've been briefed on your situation - welcome to Whateley, first of all, and also welcome to this dimension, I know that can be kind of disorienting. Do you want the tour now, or do you need some time to get ready first?"

"I don't really have any more ready to get. I mean I assume we can get clothes and a hairbrush and stuff at some point but stuff is kinda hard to hold onto when you have to flee murder robots at a moment's notice."

(Edie, who cannot fly, has now finished climbing down from the bed. She joins her sister.)

"Makes sense. You'll definitely be able to get clothes and toiletries - we can make our first stop after Poe at the Campus Store and get you stocked up. Unless you're hungry, are you hungry? A lot of our kind of mutants are pretty much always hungry, I don't know if that holds true for yours too."

"We're not more always hungry than a human with our ability to filch stuff from abandoned grocery stores without getting caught by the robots would be, but..."

"Oh. Yeah, that'd follow. - I'll show you around Poe and we can go get breakfast, then."

"Thanks."

He shows them around Poe. The upper levels are residential, ascending by grade level, bathrooms are on either side by sex. The basement contains laundry machines and a gym. The ground floor is dominated by a lounge with lots of couches and a big TV, but there's also a kitchenette, and Harry's office is located there as well.

"I keep an open-door policy, so feel free to stop by any time you want to talk, whether it's an emergency or just- whatever."

"Okay."

"This place kind of reminds us of home. --Not like our home dimension, with the robots, I mean the real home we had before the robots."

"How so?" he asks, leading them towards the Crystal Hall.

"It was a school too," she sighs. "The Xavier Academy for Gifted Youth."

"Oh. I guess one good school is like another. Especially if it's a school for mutants."

"Yeah."

They arrive at the Crystal Hall. It's a giant geodesic dome; they probably noticed it last night, but it's much more impressive in the daylight. Inside, it has three levels, the upper level containing a fountain with waterfalls down to the ground floor. There are several different buffet lines, each delineated with a unique legend. "And here we have the school cafeteria! Home to many delicious foods. The carrot sign is for vegans, the cheese is for vegetarians. The steak is for meat-eaters, not to be confused with the cow, which is for obligate carnivores. The geode is for people who eat rocks and minerals, the baguette with a line through it is gluten free, the banana is various fruits, and the cake is for desserts. You should definitely try the desserts. Also, there's the specialty kiosk, which is for people with specific dietary needs, like blood, insects, or live prey. People with otherwise-baseline tastes have been known to enjoy their fried crickets. I am not one of those people, but I wouldn't want you to miss out if it turns out you are."

"Ooooooooh." 

The twins, by mutual agreement, split up. Emily checks out the carrot, the cheese and the steak. 

While Edie heads for the banana, the cake, and the fried crickets. 

Harry goes directly for the steak, gets himself some pepperoni pizza, and secures a table for the three of them.

There's a lot of food, and all of it looks good.

Pizza. It has been years since pizza was a possibility. Not pepperoni, of course, that wouldn't be kosher. But mushrooms and vegetables are. 

Fried crickets probably aren't kosher either but it's also been years since they've had a look at a holy text and most of the kosher laws besides "pork" and "milk and meat" have been long forgotten. 

They join Harry at the table. 

Harry is willing to eat in companionable silence.

"Pizza tastes even better than I remembered," Emily mumbles around a mouthful of same. 

"Oh, yeah, pizza's great. There's always a ton of cool stuff I could get in the Crystal Hall, but I usually just go for pizza anyway, because... it's just good, I don't see why I should experiment."

"I'm more adventurous than that but the principle is sound."

"I adventure elsewhere. Pizza is sacred."

"Possibly it is a factor that I can't have the pepperoni kind."

"Oh, why not?"

"Jewish."

"Ah! Of course. There's a club for Jewish students on campus, in case you're interested in that - they meet every Saturday."

"...Oh. That's good."

"I'm glad! There's a list of officially registered clubs and teams in the Student Handbook, there'll probably be a copy of that in your dorm by the time we get back to Poe."

"--Hey, since this world's history is different, did you still have the Holocaust?"

"Yep. In our world it was connected to a lot of necromancy and magical experimentation - I guess that wouldn't have been the case in yours, given the lack of magic?"

"Nope. Just regular non-magical evil science." 

"Bad enough."

"Yup."

"Did you get the part where we're from nineteen-eighty?"

"I did. 1980, killer robots took over America, you're a different kind of mutant and your world doesn't have magic."

"And Grandmother died in the Holocaust."

"I'm sorry."

"We're alive. That's what can be salvaged, I guess."

"Being alive is important," Harry agrees. "It's not the only important thing, but it's necessary for the rest of them."

"Yeah. It's all the people who aren't that are the problem."

“Yeah. That’s not one that magic can solve, unfortunately."

"Damn."

"A lot of people have done a lot of terrible things trying to bring back the dead. I did some pretty stupid stuff, myself. It's better to focus on what we can do."

"What qualifies as stupid, here?" Emily wonders. 

"...made some deals I shouldn't have, with beings I shouldn't have been talking to, and caused a lot of problems for myself and everyone else in the process. But I got my soul back eventually, which is the important part. A lot of people aren't so lucky."

"Yeah, selling your soul sounds like a pretty obvious bad idea," she agrees. 

“Congratulations, you’re smarter than I was when I was 14 years old.”

"Probably when you were fourteen you had spent less time honing your survival instincts than I have."

“That’s certainly true. I was a kid, I had just learned there was a world outside my foster father’s house, and my... friend had just died, and I thought ‘people have been lying to me my whole life, maybe these new people are lying about whether she can come back.’ It turned out they weren’t.”

"Are you sure? I mean, um--playing with lightning will get you zapped, but now we have electronics."

"I'm not sure it could never happen. I'm sure the price would be high - too high."

"How do you know? --I mean, that's an honest question, I'm not saying I don't believe you."

"Don't worry, I got it. I've talked the subject over with a lot of other magic-users, most of whom are smarter than I am. Circe, the head of the Mystic Arts department, once proposed an entire lecture series on arcane calculus and the patterns we've observed in magical limits - the version that I actually understood is that as you attempt to break a magical law, the amount of magical energy you need to expend rapidly approaches infinity. In theory, if you could produce enough energy to start with, you could shatter the barrier, but the backlash would be... are you familiar with the concept of a 'sonic boom'?"

"I am familiar with the practice of a sonic boom."

"They're great fun, aren't they. But this magic-backlash version would be... instead of air being compressed, it's ambient magic. Instead of broken windows, magical havoc. And that's not even getting into where you'd get the energy, which is its own problem with many bad solutions and not a lot of good ones."

"Why would not being able to raise the dead be a magical barrier? Is it--about soul stuff, or brain stuff."

"Soul stuff. We don't know where souls go when people die, or where they come from when a child is ensouled, but they're intensely energetic, complex, and connected to several different planes of existence, which combined make them impossible to replicate. If someone finds the afterlife at some point, maybe the calculus will change and death will be a revolving door. Somehow I doubt it'll be that easy."

"So it's not possible to bring someone's soul back, but it might be possible to reconstruct their brain? And then maybe they could get a new soul the way children do if you do it right?"

"People have tried a lot of things, but in order to get a body from 'corpse' to 'living human' you need a soul, and so far no one's managed to coax one out of wherever they come from or wherever they go to. -well, okay, it's not strictly speaking that straightforward, a human can be alive without having a soul and there has been one recorded case of someone without a soul being ensouled, but that's getting into even weirder, more abstract theory that even Circe doesn't fully comprehend."

"I wasn't necessarily thinking of starting with a corpse..."

"Why don't you explain what you were thinking of, and I'll tell you if it might be the innovation we've been waiting for."

"I mean, I don't know how magic works, so this could be so much bullshit, but I was sort of imagining using some kind of past-scry or other information collection method to get the exact structure of the brain before death and then, uh, using that data to grow a new brain."

"Oh, sorry - I was using 'corpse' to refer to any nonsentient human body, which isn't exactly proper. You can make a brain and a body around it like that, but it comes out dead. Which can be convenient for necromancers, but is inconvenient for people who want to bring back the dead."

"That's weird, why would it work that way, you can cultivate vital human cells in a petri dish."

"Something about bioelectricity. If you're quick enough and have the right medical equipment you can intubate and fit them with a pacemaker and then you've got a coma patient instead, but they're still not the person you wanted."

"That's so weird. Still, if one could figure out what it was about new children that drew in souls...could be tricky to do ethically but not impossible, surely."

"My hypothesis is that there's some kind of agent at work. Some spirit or god who examines incoming requests, and puts up the barrier if it doesn't satisfy their criteria. If that's the case, you couldn't get through no matter how hard you studied."

"..."

"...well, okay, I guess in that case it shifts the problem to 'how do we kill that spirit or god'. But given the implied power level of a being trusted to maintain one of the laws of magic, I don't feel that much better about that question."

"It's not the kind of problem we're going to solve in our first week. But never let it be said I am unambitious when a relevantly-sized problem presents itself."

"I can respect that. First week sign up for classes, second week destroy the angel of death."

"Let's be fair, 'convince the angel of death to change their mind' is also absolutely an option."

"Oh, that's true. I... haven't had much luck convincing entities of cosmic power to change their minds, historically, but I've never been much of a diplomat, you might do better."

"Or find someone else who can do better! This doesn't seem like the kind of project best attempted alone." 

"Maybe we can start a student organization for it."

Harry chuckles. "Maybe. At any rate, even confirming my theory would take more advanced scrying magic than we have, so it's not an immediate priority - you'd want to, you know, learn how to do magic, first."

"Yeah. I'm not trying to get too far ahead of myself, I just--don't plan to give up or do anything stupid."

"Well, if you're careful and you run your theories by other mages before trying anything, I don't see anything to complain about."

"Yeah. First things first, though, we have to deal with the Sentinels before we get serious on any other project."

"Yeah. Mrs. Carson said that they're going to try to get a backer for a scouting mission, but it could take a few weeks."

"They might be able to get intelligence without the risk if they can go straight to Canada or something."

"The risk isn't the main factor, though that's good to know. The main problem is that deliberately traveling across dimensions is very difficult to accomplish; it uses up a lot of powdered mithril, which costs ten thousand dollars per ounce. Whateley's got a budget, but we'd still need help to cover that kind of expense. And if it turns out the best way to get rid of the sentinels would be a mercenary army, that's another investment. Having a backer is vital, and she needs to find one who won't take advantage of the situation - part of why she doesn't want to go to the government. Mrs. Carson does think she can get it done, but it's not a one-day problem."

"Huh."

"What's Mithril?"

"One of the more significant magical metals. It's a conduit for magic of all kinds, though there's more effective conduits for some specific fields - but you can't really go wrong with mithril. It's got a couple of other properties - it burns werewolves, for instance, and it's as strong as steel and light as aluminum - but those are secondary to its magical uses."

"There are magic metals???"

"There are! Mithril, orichalcum, bloodsteel, uh, adamantium depending on who you ask - it's not quite a metal and it's not quite magic but it's weirdly affiliated with both."

"Tell me mooooooore."

"Sure! Mithril I told you about. Orichalcum is a little stronger, a little heavier, and a lot more expensive. Magically speaking, it's basically condensed sunlight. Bloodsteel is usually created through enormous amounts of murder, but we've currently got a student who has it running through her veins, so there's kind of an ethical bloodsteel renaissance going right now; it's useful for necromancers and blood mages, who do occasionally do things that aren't nefarious. Adamantium is a compound of several different metals in a matrix of ceramic, so I don't know if it counts as metal for your purposes, but it's the most durable material that can be created by humans without using magic."

"It probably counts for some but not all of my purposes. Condensed sunlight?"

"Yeah - burns vampires, purifies some forms of magical energy like sunlight, generates light and heat indefinitely."

"Is it actually made from sunlight?"

"Sunlight is involved in its creation, yeah - not just sunlight, you need a lot of mithril and gold and some other alchemical reagents too. It's very difficult to make reliably."

"So it's less concentrated sunlight and more an alloy that has sunlight as one of its components?"

"Well, debatably - from a materials science standpoint it's closer to reinforced mithril than anything, but mystically speaking, it is sunlight, or a source of sunlight, and none of the other components stay in it. The mystical definition is the one I'm usually working with, but it makes sense you'd want the physical-world version."

"I want all the versions."

"Sensible. The Mystic Arts department has some very expensive marbles of the various materials that I can show you, too, if you can get better data that way."

"--Ooh, yes."

"We'll take a look when we're in Kirby Hall, then. Speaking of which, should we continue the tour, or do you have more advanced magical theory to ask about?"

"Hah, I think I've exhausted my store of what I know enough about to ask."

They put back their trays and Harry leads them in a counterclockwise circle around campus.

Kirby Hall, as it turns out, is their next stop after he shows them Melville Cottage. It has one door, but then Harry makes a gesture with his left hand, and there's two doors side by side.

"Circe set up the door trick," he explains. "She thinks it's important that nobody be able to get into the Mystic Arts section without having either magic or help from someone with magic. I think she just likes showing off."

"Why would that be important?"

"We've got kind of a rivalry with the Psi department, and she thinks they'd get mad if they knew how much better funded we are than them. The trials and tribulations of academia."

"Ohh, dumb academic rivalries, okay, that makes sense."

"Yep. We're mages, but we're still academics first and foremost."

He shows them inside, then opens the door to a supply closet, which turns out to contain piles of obviously magical artifacts. "Alright, where are the marbles - spare quartz, no, athame, no - that should not be in here, let me -" He slips a silver coin with a strange sigil on it into his jacket pocket.

"Ah, here they are," he says after some more searching, and picks up a Ziploc bag containing five one-inch-diameter marbles - one black, one red, one gold, one silver, one dull steel. He opens the bag and pours them into his hand, then offers them to Emily.

"Eeeeeee!" 

She claps her hands together and bounces up on her toes and the marbles rise into the air, slowly orbiting each other. 

"I've never felt anything like it!"

"Huh - I thought you said your power was magnetism? None of those are magnetic."

"It's magnetism but I can do weird stuff with it. Like push off the Earth's magnetic field to fly."

"Huh. The fifth marble is hypersteel, by the way - like adamantium it's not magical per se, it's a dimensionally nested superposition of about fifty pounds of steel. Very strong and tough, also very heavy so it's less generically useful than other materials."

"It feels really cool."

"I'm glad. Just let me know when you're done with them."

She plays with them for a few more minutes and then, slightly reluctantly, sets them down. 

And Harry shows them around the rest of campus. Cottage, cottage, classroom building, library, massive combat arena-

"Oh, neat. Any special features?"

"Yeah, it's all hooked up to a virtual reality interface so you can fight full-force without anybody getting injured. It didn't used to be, I had my Combat Finals in the old arena and I broke more than a few bones, but they had healers on standby to fix up anybody who got hurt. Still, it's better to avoid the issue entirely."

"How does the virtual reality model everyone's powers? Is it just that good?"

"It was built by a Devisor, and they don't have to follow the laws of physics. So yes, it's just that good."

"Devisor?"

"-oh, nobody's given you the Powers Theory spiel yet. Devisors make machines that don't function based on the same laws of physics the rest of us use. Avatars channel the power of a spirit, granting them other powers besides that, based on what spirit they access. Espers have various forms of extrasensory perception, like empathy or psychometry. Energizers absorb some form of energy from some source and can release it in some specific form, often either physical speed or energy blasts. Gadgeteers have an instinctual understanding of technology, and can create things far beyond the current cutting edge; technically they're a kind of Esper, because they're easily capable of understanding and improving on devices they've never seen before. Manifestors can create some form of temporary material, like a suit of metallic armor or a geyser of human blood. Mimics can mimic other powers, regenerators can, well, regenerate, shifters can change their shape. Telekinetics have telekinesis, which can be at range or to enhance their own strength, or both. Warpers affect the laws of reality directly in some way, such as by altering probability or by teleporting. Mages have an easier time using some specific form of magic, and psychics have telepathic abilities, often along with telekinesis. There's a class you'll take that'll explain all this in more detail."

"...Mmmmmmost of those we don't really have an equivalent for...but Dr. McCoy could maybe be a Gadgeteer, and...I know of one guy who could be called an Energizer and, uh, he killed my grandmother. In Auschwitz."

"...well, most of them aren't like that, fortunately. Powers aren't very personality-correlated."

"I imagine. He's just...the relevant example, from our world. And I don't feel comfortable even mentioning him without giving context."

"I can understand that."

Harry shows them the rest of the campus. After the arena it's mostly normal, apart from a couple of shooting ranges. They eventually circle back to the Crystal Hall, and Harry shows them into an attached building, which after they go down a few stairs turns out to contain a space about the size of an aircraft hangar, occupied by a massive shopping center.

"You can get anything you need here - I'd recommend getting clothes and toiletries, obviously, plus a cell phone for each of you and anything else you think you'll need. Your ID cards are loaded up with some spending money. A thousand dollars each."

"Whoah. --What's a cell phone."

"It's a phone you can keep in your pocket, and the better versions let you connect to the Internet too. -the Internet is a global network that links all of the computers in the world together, it's kind of like a combination library and public forum, it's really neat."

"The future is neat." 

"I've often thought so!"

Prominently displayed near the front of the store is a display of one-inch marbles of various metals - everything from lead to tin to osmium. "Oh, and the store stocking algorithm has precognition. I always forget about that."

Eeeeee. "Precognition?"

"Sees the future, like some kinds of Esper. It was made by a Devisor. Nobody knows exactly how it works."

"And it has weirdly perfect stock as a result?"

"Yep! Everything from metal marble samplers to, in one memorable case, fifty pounds of dried seaweed, which my protege Ariel saw as it was being purchased."

"Any idea what it was for?"

"Not a clue. Probably a devise of some kind."

"That makes sense." 

"Probably not hypersteel, though." 

"No, no, hypersteel you just need a bunch of steel and a dimensional exponentiation chamber. They could've been making hyperseaweed, I guess."

"Ecologically fascinating."

"Not really, it'd just be heavy and very hard to chew but otherwise identical to regular seaweed."

"Only if it was the exact same thing as hypersteel. I don't get the impression these Devisors are all that conceptually limited." 

"Oh, if some Devisor made a seaweed devise for their own purposes then anything could happen, I was just thinking if you put a bunch of seaweed in an exponentiator. But now that you mention it, it would probably have been their own thing."

He considers. "Well, anything that didn't escape and eat Dunwich can't have been that important."

"Do things escape and eat places a lot?"

"No, I was joking. Lab accidents happen, but they're usually pretty minor."

"Ohgood."

Harry shows them around the store. Clothes, toiletries, books, snacks, furniture, personal armaments: all this and more can be theirs.

Clothes! The kind of ridiculously embroidered stuff she liked when she was six and it turns out she still does! Toiletries! Detangler rated for years and years of neglect! Books! Treatises on engineering and social activism history! Snacks! High-calorie high-shelf life stuff to squirrel away for emergencies! ...Personal armaments, tell her more. 

The personal armaments available are mostly different kinds of knife, though there's some swords and a rack of javelins as well. There's a little sign saying that students wishing to purchase a personal firearm will need to present a carry permit, and due to this guns are stored behind the counter.

That's okay, she doesn't give a shit about guns, if she needs small chunks of metal accelerated very fast she can do that with so much more control herself. Anything interesting she can't really do herself in the knives selection or should she turn a corner and probably find a palette of titanium chunks or something. 

There's a couple of very cool knives, but probably nothing she couldn't make with metal and time.

She'll just go for some nice raw materials then. 

Raw materials are certainly available.

Excellent. She feels so much better with some nice titanium alloys secreted away beneath her clothes. 

They can pay at the front, then, and then leave the store.

"Got everything you were looking for?" Harry asks.

"Mhm!"