"I only knew one of the four to any extent worth mentioning," Cindy repeated, holding her hand out in a staying motion, "but I have ties to another three in that... I knew alternate versions of them, you could say. Like one of them is a guy I knew really well in my world, except he's a lot younger. And another one of them lived a different history than when I knew her in my world, but she's definitely still some variation on a theme. Same name, same appearance, you know." Cindy hoped that she wasn't giving too much away about her companions, but speaking of them only with gendered pronouns seemed safe enough. She could keep their names to herself, could keep their identities under wraps.

Until if and when it ever became appropriate to share them — which was not at all her decision to make.

"And there might be even more people who could plausibly be from my world, but that I can't easily play three degrees of separation with," she went on. "People who obviously know about New York, who might even have lived in a version of New York with the same President of the United States, and so on. Lots of people are from the United States. So there are clearly indications that things here aren't completely random."

Her lips quirked slightly at the mention of the Cephalosquad. Cindy needed to be careful not to give away too many details of that incident, having been there personally, but it was definitely the sort of news that would have been noticed by people like the two of them — people who were looking for the strange and inexplicable.

"Yeah, there's definitely some kind of shadow network, you could say, that's funneling funds into the wrong hands. Hands who'll use it to exploit something, or someone, and never in the favor of those of us from outside. Kirin's Horn is the worst such group that I know of, far outstrips the local gangs. Hydra's another."