"So, you'll help me?" Akane asked.

"Right now, I'm feeling a solid maybe," I said. "My help will not come freely or cheaply. When I arrived here earlier today, all I had was twelve dollars and a gun."

"I have an apartment and space for a roommate," Akane offered.

I grunted. It was not, in my experience, terribly difficult to use technomancy to get an apartment. All I needed was somewhere that handled pretty much everything electronically, with a landlord who wouldn't notice that this tenant hadn't been there a week ago.

But that was how things worked in the old world, where, if a demiurge did something illegal, pretty much nobody but another demiurge would be able to stop them, and frequently wouldn't care enough to do so, even if they noticed. Here, though, there were superheroes. And while, sure, I can probably assert with confidence that most superheroes are more concerned with people robbing banks or liquor stores, I cannot say with complete certainty that I will not have to shoot some jabroni dead because they've got a bug up their ass about people getting things they somehow "don't deserve."

And, well... Okay. Maybe I liked Akane a little. For shallow reasons, which I was prepared to abandon if it turned out I couldn't tolerate her extended presence, but if I had to choose between a stressful operation out of a shitty motel and moving in with a new friend, the choice was clear.

But of course, there was the question of whether or not I wanted to mentor her. Setting aside the sheer amount of work that goes into mentoring a new mad scientist, my own mentor had been... shall we say, atrocious. I honestly didn't trust my own ability to mentor new demiurges. But, at the same time, new demiurges without any sort of mentorship tended to go way off the deep end, creating all sorts of godawful trouble. However bad I was, I couldn't be worse than Akane accidentally unleashing a plague of undeath on this world.

And, again, I liked her. I'd feel bad about letting her go crazy and get herself killed.

"...That's a start," I said. "Of course, doing mad science in an apartment isn't what we'd call a long-term solution. It limits you to small stuff, and a very intermittent work schedule, because you're never willing to bite the bullet and dedicate a whole room to being a proper workshop, and then there's neighbors... Bleh. Bleh."

"Mad science sounds inconvenient," Akane said.

"You have no idea," I said. "Which means, I suppose, if the two of us are going to work together for the next little while, we're going to have to do so pretty closely."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Since you've got credentials in this world, and I don't, I'm just gonna have to fast-track you into homeownership," I said.

It was only the fact that Akane had seemed so totally harmless and even guileless for the entire time I'd known her that stopped me from flipping out as much as I should have when she flung herself at me, wrapping me up in a tight hug and bowling me over backwards onto the cheap, creaky motel bed.

"...Hello," I said, after I caught my breath.

"Hi," she replied, before giggling a little.

"I take it you're happy with that arrangement?"

"Mhm!" she said. "Thank you so much, Roxy." She was soft and warm. Open and inviting. And the first hug I'd received in a while. I had to admit, I... wasn't entirely unhappy about this.

"Tell you what," I said, awkwardly reaching up to pat her on the back. "Let's get my crap schlepped back to your apartment, and then, day after tomorrow, I'll give you your first real lesson on mad science. After that, then you can decide if you still want to thank me."

"Is it gonna be bad?" Akane asked.

"...You'll see."

Akane's apartment was a decent-sized unit in a building that felt oddly familiar to me. Like I'd been here before. I might've, back in the old world- though I'd jumped dimensions, I was apparently still in Austin, and I'd lived in this city my whole life. I hadn't gotten downtown that much, but I'd visited a few people who lived downtown before.

"Are you, by any chance, a college student?" I asked.

It certainly looked that way. Her apartment was a mess, with clothes, dishes, and papers scattered everywhere. Her kitchenette was filthy, with even more dishes piled in and around the sink. Worst of all, though, was the only table in the room, laden with a horrifying, godawful mess of twisted wires, ribbon cables, circuit boards that someone had clearly taken a hacksaw to, several antennae, and what had probably once been a Nerf gun before this monster laid hands on it. It looked like a particularly cancerous weekend project had metastasized. It looked like an electro-mechanical murder scene. It looked like a campfire story told by a self-proclaimed maker who desperately needed to go outside.

"Yeah, sorry about the mess," Akane said sheepishly.

There were noteworthy things that weren't mess and clutter. A big poster on one wall that was a map of the Milky Way, with Sol circled in red with an arrow labeled "You Are Here." A model aircraft hung from the ceiling, a B2 flying wing stealth bomber that had been constructed from foamboard and spray-painted by someone who didn't realized that spray paint dissolved foam and produced a pitted, corroded mess. Or by someone who did, and wanted a weathered, battle-scarred appearance to their plane. There was also, on one of the bookshelves, a bright orange ceramic cat head, which was hollow and contained a variety of pens, pencils, and markers.

"...I can work with this," I said. "Probably. We'll deal with it later- I'll give you a robotics lesson when we're not all tired and burned out, and we'll build a robot maid to keep this place in order."

"You can do that?" Akane asked.

"I've been doing this long enough to pick up a little bit of everything," I said. "Weapons, vehicles, armor, medicine, transmutation... But among my specialties are scanners, and robots. Yes, I can in fact make a robot maid. I don't think I'll be able to teach you enough to make one on your own- it's a complicated subject that takes months to learn, and there's no guarantee you'll have any aptitude for it. But I think it's worth it to know a little bit of everything."

"How long will that take?" Akane asked.

"Uhhh..." I grimaced. "...Probably longer than I'll be here, actually. Okay, maybe... maybe we should focus instead, and try to stick to your natural aptitudes."

"Awww, but I want to learn everything," Akane said, pouting. "I'm just... so curious."

"Yeah, I can tell," I said. Curiosity was one of the common driving emotions for mad scientists- it was the most harmless as a baseline, but with obsessive tendencies that could bring it well above par if they lost enough marbles. "Be patient. With or without me, you've got the whole rest of your life to keep learning, and it can be a pretty long one if you study mad medicine and don't do anything that'd get you killed."

"...How long?" Akane asked.

"Well, it depends on a lot of things," I said. "Immortality is... possible, if very difficult to pull off. As a rough ballpark... provided you're willing to live a very boring life where nobody shoots at you and you don't work with anything more energetic than a computer, you should probably make it to at least a hundred." I frowned. "Of course, that's all predicated on living in my world, where the supernatural scene is more of a solipsistic nightmare rather than a constant public battleground like what superheroes have to deal with. You're going to have to figure out your life expectancy the old-fashioned way by seeing how long it takes for you to die."

"What is it like, in your world?" Akane asked.

"Unpleasant," I said. "It's late, though, and I'd rather not get into it tonight."

"Aww..."

"Be patient."

Akane sighed, before finally sitting down on her couch- after brushing some papers out of the way. "Sit down wherever, I'll... get to this all eventually."

"Are you busy tomorrow?"

"Kinda, yeah," Akane said. "Sorry..."

"Eh, it's fine," I said. "I've got my own things to do tomorrow."

"The day after, though, I've got time for our first mad science lesson," Akane said. "And maybe this weekend I can introduce you to Nicky?"

"Oh, hell," I said. "Do I actually need to meet her? I'd prefer to keep as low a profile as I can, here."

"She's not going to blab about your secret identity," Akane reassured me.

"She definitely won't if she doesn't know it," I said. "I'm not interested in taking a pointless risk."

"We don't have to tell her you're my mentor," Akane proposed. "We could just say you're my totally mundane roommate."

"You think she'll buy that?" I asked.

"She knows me pretty well," Akane said, nodding. "One thing she knows is that I do not like living alone. The fact I managed to go this long without a roommate is what she wouldn't buy, unless I... brought up... the fact I had a nervous breakdown." Akane blinked. "...Roxy, I think I know why it's only now that I got powers."

"Yeah, you had what we call a Breakthrough," I said. "It's usually a pretty messy process, even for people driven by curiosity, like yourself. They are way nastier for the Sorrowful and the Hopeful, and we're not even touching what it's like for the Enraged or the Banished. Anyway, you should probably touch base with your mortal responsibilities, just in case you've been neglecting those."

"...Oh shit," Akane said. "Shit, shit, shit-"

"Stop. Inhale," I said. "One, two, three, four, five. Exhale. Listen carefully." She nodded, exhaling. "Here's your story: living alone has done unpleasant things to your psyche, and today or a few days ago, whichever works better, I, your concerned friend, finally came to your apartment to check in on you. You are appreciative of my concern, and have accepted that, yes, you do need someone to live with you to make sure you live like a normal person. And because I don't have a fixed place of work to commute to, I was able to move in immediately, and the process of moving in the rest of my stuff will happen more or less at our leisure over the next month. With me so far?"

Akane nodded. "I had an episode, and you pulled me out of it, and you're moving in with me out of concern. Got it."

"Now, I'm going to need you to do some thinking here, too: what is it about the two of us that you trust me to live with you, without the sort of close relationship that means everyone else in your life would've heard of or even met me by now?" I asked.

"Uhhh..." Akane racked her brain. "...Oh! We're both gay, and clocked each other at the grocery store, right after Nicky moved out. We got to talking, and it turns out we already know each other from the Discord of some web serial we're both into! We hung out over here once or twice, and then when I disappeared, you got concerned and came knocking!"

I blinked. "...Y'all have Discord and web serials here too? Huh." I shrugged. "Alright, I can live with that, but, the web serial has to be one that you'd be ashamed or just unwilling to talk about with other people you already know personally, unless your friends and family expect you to not talk about your media consumption habits."

"There are things I don't tell people," Akane said, nodding. "That's how it is for everyone, even people who aren't that secretive. Only little kids narrate every little thing that happens to other people."

"Fair enough," I said with a shrug. "...So, you're gay too, huh? Lesbian, bisexual, asexual-spectrum?"

"Lesbian," Akane said, nodding. "You?"

"Lesbian and trans," I said.

"I could tell, but, good to get confirmation," Akane said. "You really liked that hug I gave you earlier. Unless that was a gun in your pocket?" She hummed. "Actually, if it's not too invasive, you mind if I ask what kind of hormones they give you in A-510? I hear that estrogen tends to kill sex drives, here."

"I'm not on hormones," I said. "I'm a Research Fellow at the Institute of Applied Transhumanism; one of the many, many gadgets I've stuck in my brain is a psychic shapeshifting subroutine. It is the pinnacle of gender euphoria- I get to look exactly how I like."

"Psychic shapeshifting?" Akane asked.

"The theory behind it is convoluted and useless," I said. "I'll tell you tomorrow, after you've gotten a full night's sleep in a real bed."

"Goodnight, Mom," Akane said, slowly standing up.

"Night, brat," I said, as she headed to her bedroom.