"Oh, no, it's very convenient, she can work as my spotter and help me design experiments and effective controls on what's my expectation and what's other people's and what's my expectation of their expectation and so on."

"I guess it does make her an effective control, but it also means you can't do tests working with other peoples' expectations. Especially if you keep it secret."

"Oh we did test that, too, and it's actually much easier if they don't know: I merely tell them a thing will happen and try to make that thing happen, or something different, or whatever, and see how much influence they have on it. Power testing is standard Protectorate procedure for new capes."

"And no one you've tested with has guessed how your power really works?"

"Nope. It's not really that easy to guess, making stuff appear out of thin air isn't that unreasonable as far as powers go and inviting other people for the ostensive purpose of seeing how different powers interact is par for the course for this kind of test. Besides, I already have a public weakness and fictional description that account for it, so most people don't tend to look farther than that."

"What's the public weakness?"

"The squinting thing. My power doesn't like it when people look too hard at it, or pay too much attention to what I conjured. This one isn't strictly mental so Lorica can do it, too. Also I describe it as 'being able to conjure increasingly complex things the more practice I get' which is to account for why I can't create Endbringer-killing lasers now but presumably will be able to, in the future. Once enough people believe in me," he says, smirking.

"That's a very tidy cover."

"Yep! Also not unheard of, there's this other hero in my team who can imbue certain objects with power so they can become 'more themselves.' He has an electrical lance and a shield that makes forcefields and a sword that's super sharp and easier to wield and superspeed boots and a good vision helmet and he hasn't reached an upper limit to how much he can improve his items."

"I guess it's good for you that in your world some powers are just strictly better than others; otherwise you'd have to come up with a more limiting weakness."

"Oh, yeah, definitely. Like, Scion just breaks the game, but even without taking him into account, you got people like Eidolon, who can have any powers, and can have up to three of them at the same time. Or, on the villains side, you got people like Gray Boy who is terrifying and the Siberian who is just as much." He shudders.

"You could be even more powerful than Eidolon if you had a reputation that supported it."

"Yep," he says smugly.

"Any reason why you don't, I don't know, disguise yourself as a Scion-like figure and kill all the Endbringers immediately?"

"There's always someone tracking Scion's current location, and if people knew it was just a copy they wouldn't believe it was as powerful as the real thing."

"True."

"... although now you know that other people can use your power to do anything you can do. That might help somehow."

"Well, more or less, I can still easily dismiss anything I conjure regardless of anything else."

Mary considers asking him whether he's ever made food and thinks better of it.

"Right. Conjuring stuff and not being able to dismiss it easily is definitely a logistical quandary."

"Yeah, it is, and for that matter, your turn for the exposition."

"Well, what do you want to know?"

"Everything! Or, well, I dunno, an intro like the one I did for my world would be cool."

"Well, magic is only a few years old -- I don't actually know when it started. But the person who first had it is named Devon Ross. He went to collect the Randi Fund, and probably something else, too, because he immediately decided to buy an island. He was advertising it as a post-scarcity society; he said all these things about the end of energy and material shortages. 

My sister and I were some of the first people there. Long story short -- I figured out how to duplicate his magic. I also found out that everyone who's ever eaten his food is in danger. I guess he was so excited by his vision of utopia that he never thought to test his magic properly."

"In danger bec—oh. Because they can disappear. Yeah, that's bad. How does your magic work, exactly?"

"I'm not sure. Not on a deep level, anyway. Heidi has better theories than I do."

(Heidi is still dancing. She's not used to having her own body and is thoroughly enjoying it.)