Fancy Meeting You Here

[iamnotpolaris]

(While neither thread is intended to begin a larger glowfic, the Emily in this thread is specifically intended to be the Emily from http://glowfic.dreamwidth.org/18547.html)

Oh, look, Milliways!
Emily takes out a notebook and scribbles down the question she had for her professor so she won't forget it if she ends up spending a lot of time or is otherwise distracted, then strolls cheerfully into the bar.
"Hi, Bar! Can I get some kind of milkshake or something, please?"

Comments

[unmarred]

"Yeah."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I mean, it wasn't all bad! That's how he met my father, is that the nazi was trying to do evil things again and my father was trying to thwart him."

[unmarred]

"Oh, good for your father."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yeah. And then of course the whole mutants thing went public..."

[unmarred]

"Oh?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Ah--when I say mutants, I don't just mean blue eyes or lactose tolerance or the shit that apparently goes down on Barrayar. 'Mutants' in my world are people with something called the X-Gene that activates a bunch of what would otherwise be junk DNA. Results range from blue skin to fully-functional wings to less explicable superpowers, often in the same person. I do magnetism." She flutters her fingers, and her steel bracelet divides into three pieces and floats off her wrist. "Evil Nazi Doctor was also a mutant, he did some really nasty stuff with energy. He took an interest in Edie's dad because he manifested his mutant powers trying to avoid being separated from his mother. He...had no way of knowing how badly that was going to backfire. Anyway, thwarting Schmidt--who was using the name Sebastian Shaw at that point, we still don't know which if either was his real name--ended up being very public. Do you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ivan didn't but he was neither raised on Earth nor did he display any particular historical interest that I observed."

[unmarred]

"It rings a distant bell. Cold War...?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yeah. In my universe, Shaw-slash-Schmidt engineered the Cuban Missile Crisis to try to turn the Cold War hot, because he for some idiot reason believed that massive amounts of radiation would benefit mutants while it was killing off everyone else, creating a new world where he was on the top and only people with what he saw as good genes would survive."

[unmarred]

"Your variety of mutants is clearly something very out of the ordinary as far as my world's science is concerned, so is that as absurd a plan as it sounds...?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Yes. My kind of mutants is caused by one gene that affects other genes. Random genetic damage is still random. And radiation poisoning will still get you before you could reproduce in the first place unless your mutation would specifically protect against that, which some of them would."

[unmarred]

"Oh, what fun. And how did your father and his friend deal with this fool...?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"My father's a telepath, and Erik--that's his name, Erik Lehnsherr--does magnetism too, so Papa held him still while Erik drove a coin through his forehead. This being the same coin he had failed to lift when Shaw was pointing a gun at his mother," she clarifies.

[unmarred]

"How very poetic."

[iamnotpolaris]

"That's one word for it. At that point in his life he was kind of a tangle of rage and drama."

[unmarred]

"Yeah."

[iamnotpolaris]

"But he got better, thank God."

[unmarred]

"That's good."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Evidence mostly in the form of 'people from similar but very, very different universes' suggests that if Edie hadn't happened he would've graduated to supervillain after the fight he had with my father when it was over. So yes, it definitely is."

[unmarred]

"Mm?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Okay, so after Shaw was dead, some idiot decided to fire missiles at the commotion on the beach. Erik stopped them. Erik was going to throw them back at the people who fired them. Papa objected. They ended up wrestling, and someone decided to shoot Erik in order to stop him from causing an international incident. He deflected the bullet. He did not deflect the bullet enough. It hit Papa in the spine. Words were exchanged. They were not, in the heat of the moment, well-thought out words. Erik took Aunt Raven and Shaw's former cronies and went off to sulk for a while. Then it became apparent that Edie--and I--existed, and this led to the two of them being stuck in a room together long enough that it came out that no, the things Papa said when he had just been hit in the back with a bullet were not his objective opinions, and they reconciled."

[unmarred]

"I see. Out of curiosity, are you dancing awkwardly around the family situation of the four of you or is there something else going on?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I am dancing awkwardly around it. So you know how I mentioned that people could have blue skin and wings and stuff..?"

[unmarred]

"Yes?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"It's not only obvious, external physical differences that happen. From a purely medical standpoint my parents are both basically hermaphrodites. But they're both men in every other meaningful way."

[unmarred]

"Did they know anything about this before the - I'm assuming accidental pregnancies? That must have been quite the surprise."