Most Likely A Refuge

[whatamithinking]

It was probably safe.

The bar was...unusually reticent, in the lower layers of her mind (and she hadn't pried further; she wasn't sure if she'd be noticed; she wasn't sure if offending would get her kicked out, and regardless of whether it was actually safe it was safer than anywhere else she'd been for the past...three years?) so she couldn't be sure this place wasn't really a trap of some kind, but the higher layers gave a plausible explanation that didn't involve being a trap, and whatever else it was warm and dry and had food. Her guard was probably a full 25% down. Positively trusting, these days.

Comments

[whatamithinking]

"I mean, it's a good idea, but then you have the question of how to find them. Just asking seems...ineffectual at best, extremely rude at worst."

[onceandforall]

"Well, don't go ask individuals on the street. Maybe try the Internet or ask nice friendly Christian clergypeople if they can put you in touch with anyone who has that sort of history."

[whatamithinking]

"I might go with the latter one, that's a good idea. Trying to find someone on the internet with criteria like that...I'm not sure how I'd go about it."

[onceandforall]

"You'd have to be prepared to filter. Heavily."

[whatamithinking]

"...Doing it personally sounds like an exercise in anger management techniques, but maybe I could hire a magical girl groupie or something to do it."

[onceandforall]

"Do you get a lot of those?"

[whatamithinking]

"Personally, not a whole lot, but I'm public enough about my goals and opinions to have a niche following of mostly tumblr social justice warriors. The trick would be finding one who would not also find the task an exercise in anger management techniques."

[onceandforall]

"I'm not sure anyone describable as a 'social justice warrior' will match that description."

[whatamithinking]

"Yeah. It is only mostly, thankfully, but."

[onceandforall]

"What's tumblr?"

[whatamithinking]

"...It's a website. For blogging, mostly. And you can 'reblog' someone else's post to your own blog and add a comment and add tags and there's a bunch of cultural baggage to go with it."

[onceandforall]

"Joy."

[whatamithinking]

"Enh, it's not bad. Not, like, bad cultural baggage, I just mean that I don't think I can explain the whole thing without more time than I suspect either of us care to allocate to the project."

[onceandforall]

"All right."

[whatamithinking]

"Um," says the other one. "What's the internet?"

[onceandforall]

"What year are you from?"

[whatamithinking]

"Nineteen-eighty."

[onceandforall]

"So, the internet is when computers get really cheap and popular and can call each other on the phone only better. So if you assemble some information or write a story or take pictures or whatever you can put them on a computer and all the other computers can get ahold of it at any time. It is even cooler than it sounds."

[whatamithinking]

"Oh. That does sound pretty cool."

[onceandforall]

"It's great. I'm sure it gets even better, only I'm stuck in early 2005 till I figure out how to save the world."

[whatamithinking]

"Well, we might not get it at all, considering. Maybe if things ever settle down."

[onceandforall]

"What happened?"

[whatamithinking]

"...Okay, so I'm a mutant. Most mutants aren't telepaths, but we usually have powers of some kind. A rogue faction of the government got scared enough of us to develop murder robots, kidnap my shapeshifter aunt to--augment their adaptability somehow, I don't know--and decide to wipe us out, and incidentally conquer the country since otherwise they'd be fugitives for mass murder. Things...sort of escalated from there."

[onceandforall]

"Did it snowball to other countries too?"

[whatamithinking]

"I don't know. It hadn't as of three years ago, but I haven't had access to consistent enough communications since then to know if that's still the case."