Rent, it's a short term gig.

Fair enough! Then they can rent an apartment with no particular problems.

They spend some of their relocation bonus on stocking the kitchen and buying furniture for the apartment and getting a few more articles of clothing for Xander, especially since he might want to surrender his original ones as evidence about their world.

They can do this! A couple of times during their shopping, people show up and ask Isabella for autographs and what her superhero name is (since she does seem to be going around in a superhero costume, and, also, wings) but so far nobody has needed her to get any cats out of any trees.

The Twentieth Century Foundation would kind of like to buy their alternate-universe possessions, yes; they can't think of very many specific ways they could be useful, but tinkers can be pretty weird sometimes and more alien artifacts can't hurt.

Isabella didn't have many objects - just her ID card and some pens, besides a notebook and phone that contains personal information she doesn't want to hand over, but she could tear that out/delete them and present the rest of the items if desired. Xander had his clothes and his phone (which he doesn't keep personal notes on) and his keys and the carabiner he kept them on and the somewhat battered syllabus for his Intro Psych class.

Isabella signs things with her real name. She's going around with her real face, why not.

If the notebook and phone have personal notes she wants to keep, those are fine; they'll definitely pay for Xander's phone, and the rest of it.

There are no horrible consequences to Isabella using her real name. At least, not yet.

(There does, however, turn out to be more paperwork for the two of them to do to get their permanent residency. It is not particularly difficult or complicated paperwork, it is just more.)

Neither twin has any particular difficulty with doing paperwork and this is a reasonable occasion for it!

Then the paperwork will soon be done and they will have be legally considered permanent residents of the this United States of America!

Yaaaaay.

They show up to work in their fancy offices.

(Xander has decided that he is going to be the sort of person who wears suits for this purpose.)

The offices are less 'fancy' and more 'Minerva declines to have HQ buildings that don't fit her aesthetic', but yes, they are a lot better than most offices. They have work computers and long lists of questions they're supposed to answer without comparing answers with each other, divided into lots of different categories (Prices! Salaries! Magic! Recent history! Ancient history! Cell phones! Tax laws!) There's an employee cafeteria on-site which is actually good.

Ooh, actually-good cafeteria.

In general Isabella has retained more information more confidently than Xander has except in various art-related topics, especially fashion, and some pop culture, but it's still important to have corroboration. They compare their morning answers over lunch so they can try to triangulate off each other and see if their memories jog that way.

The cafeteria specializes in vegan food that is not horrible, but is not restricted to it.

Comparing memories after they've answered the questions is fine, but they still want the multiple sources of information first.

They get some friendly greetings during lunch from co-workers, but mostly people are working on their own projects. None of them sound terribly evil or destructive, unless the crew trying to get the government to amend laws for tinker work are wrong about their obscure implementation details.

Isabella is curious about those other projects! What's wrong with the laws about tinker work?

They are happy to have someone to tell all about their work! The thing is, tinkers wouldn't be tinkers if they weren't obsessive about their work, so it's really hard to deter tinkers with penalties - especially some of the stronger ones, because obsession intensity correlates strongly with power - and if the work they need to do to get approved (or funded) for their experiments is too onerous, or their experiments are forbidden and they don't have another project to switch to, they just do it unapproved and go to the black market if they have to and that's where you get tinker supervillains from. Like Steelstorm, who mass-produces robots and could have completely revolutionized the economy in the U.S. and is mass-producing robot soldiers for the Titanium Tyrant because he got denied funding forty years ago. So we need easy procedures to fill out and safety precautions they can follow and loose labor laws and lots of subsidies for tinkers, to make it worth their interest to act like a sane scientist instead of a mad one.

On the other hand, tinkers sometimes also build things that explode and take the surrounding very large region with them. Like Desolation and Margrave and Doctor Devastation and not like Tinker Academy although everyone brings that one up, nobody actually died because there were good safety precautions. But we very definitely need the government to make sure that tinkers do not do things that might blow up cities, or, God help us, the planet, and actually observe basic safety precautions.

And, of course, if conditions for tinkers are attractive enough, then non-tinkers will try to claim to be tinkers to get in, or companies will hire a tinker as a frontman for projects that are one percent tinker work, ninety-nine percent regular scientists who want big subsidies and to dodge required standards, so there's a good deal of institutional fraud, and we need laws to try and solve that. The basic laws that established the Bureau of Enhanced Research in 1980 tried to err on the side of low regulation and lots of paying tinkers to work within the law, and then there was a very intense loophole-finding effort which mostly succeeded, and court cases and spot legislation tried to patch those and patched some of them but made it a lot harder for tinkers without connections to get approval, and there was the Tinker Academy scandal and the government panicked and issued the terrible Helen Draper Law and we don't want that repealed but we do need a revised and improved version that was written by people who have ever met tinkers in their lives.

Isabella obviously lacks some background - like why tinkers have to be so obsessive, do other powers here have effects like that, hers mostly just makes her gayer - and who the Titanium Tyrant is - and what Tinker Academy was - how do you test for tinker powers - and what the Helen Draper law is.

In order to become a tinker in the first place, you need to be obsessed with getting something to work and under sufficient stress from focusing intently on the project that your body thinks it's under attack and manifests superpowers, so except in the case of tinkers who have self-modified their brains it's wholly a selection effect, just a really strong one. Usually the only things that modify brains are Idealizing and some second-order powers.

(Also, she's gay? Huh.)

Anyway, the Titanium Tyrant is the world's most famous supervillain, he almost took over the world several times and once killed Voidwrath. (It didn't stick, obviously.) Twenty-ish years ago he conquered a Caribbean island and beat everyone who tried to liberate it and retired to ruling it and it's now an offshore haven for basically everything illegal, and he has nukes and like a hundred supervillains working for him. His wife's the Gorgon Queen and she has mind control powers.

Tinker Academy was Minerva's idea; she tried to set up a school to teach teenage tinkers safe procedures and then one of them made nanobots and then another one - Helen Draper - modified the guy's nanobots and accidentally removed the replication limit and she wound up losing both legs and one of her arms and only barely lived and that's because they were doing it in a building Minerva had been sensibly paranoid about. They both ended up charged with reckless negligence and wearing permanent power-nullifiers for life, but the government still passed a law named after her requiring much stricter lab safety procedures for anything tinker-related that's potentially dangerous (i.e., anything tinker-related).

Some tinkers have made abilities that test for tinker powers, but the cheap way of doing it is that you have someone else try to build something from a suspected tinker's patents, and if they do exactly the same thing and can't make it work, the tinker's a tinker. (That's how they know the Titanium Tyrant isn't a tinker; basically all powered armor is reverse engineered from the Titanium Tyrant's Durendal, since he didn't take out patents or anything before building it.)

"Technically speaking I'm 'thaumosexual', attracted exclusively to other magical girls, it's a side effect, I was straight before. ...I should look up some pictures of various superheroes and see if any of them count, actually, if any of them do probably both genders will..."

"Since Minerva doesn't have powers per se any more does that mean she can't add to her hive?"

"Huh." Weird superheroes are weird!

"Right. Minerva will die eventually from all of her bodies dying if no new tinker who can make new bodies for her appears. The Smith does maintenance for her but she keeps fighting desperate supervillain battles and losing bodies in them."

"Huh. I hope she can get some new ones at some point but have no angle on it whatsoever."

Internet query: are superheroes hot?

Yeah, most people don't have any angles on it either.

And: Some of 'em! Some superheroes aren't hot at all.

Well, some magical girls aren't hot at all either, some of them are, like, eight, or that paladin with a modern art shtick who goes around with her face painted like a Mondrian, or whatever. It is nice to know that some superheroes are hot. If she is stuck here forever maybe she will meet a nice superhero even though it's an awkward restriction to have.

I mean, she's pretty sure that she noticed a couple people in, like, the background of large group shots who were also attractive? Not a significant number, but not literally zero either.

Secret identities, presumably. ...are secret identities the sort of thing where it's actually a bad unbalancing problem if she can see through them by checking people out.