"Our greatest didn't tend to live for more than a few years after hitting their peak."

"Why is that?"

"The radiation from the corpse was eventually deadly. And there were monsters, mostly along the Exclusion Zones."

"Were there any other such creatures?"

"As the original abomination? Not that I've found, and I've looked." Well, not yet, there weren't.

"Is it known where it came from?"

"I tracked it to - a sort of un-place, between worlds. Look, as much as I enjoy telling stories, I don't see how this is relevant to your potential commission, unless your problem's with something similar."

"It might have been. My world also has—creatures like that. Most people don't know, though."

"The nature of various things is within Tycho's power to determine; it'll likely be very obvious to us if there is such a being in your world."

"Which means there isn't? Or would looking at me not be sufficient?"

"You don't show any signs of coming into contact with one. That doesn't mean there isn't one somewhere in your universe or a neighboring one."

"If it was the same sort of thing, I would have come into contact with it. It might be merely similar."

"That's entirely possible. Is it at all like the being you have an extradimensional connection to?"

"You can see that. Yes, it is."

"Do you have any concrete information on how it would differ from yours?" The being connected to the woman feels - strange. Incomplete. Like a shackled computer disconnected from its network, when half of its functionality is tied to the cloud. Seeing into other dimensions is hard, especially from Milliways, but she's also fairly sure it's supposed to run simulations and calculations, and it sounds like whatever the woman's concerned about is worse than a computer capable of predictive models. Which, given accurate enough models, would still be a viable threat most places.

"Mine is dead, in a sense. The other one is not."

That... Doesn't give her much information at all. "Is it better at running calculations? Can it do more complex tasks, or more of them at once? Is it larger? Does it have other abilities? Is it likely to notice if I stick Tycho in your world for a short time?"

"We can only conjecture, but it seems likely that the other was more focused on combat and tactics, whereas mine was more focused on planning and strategy."

She mentally pokes at it more. Beyond the simple computer connected to the woman is something vast, the connection so faint she hadn't spotted it before. She might not call it dead, though it certainly is horribly damaged.

"That'll be tough, especially if you want to minimize collateral damage, and I'm not sure if your world has the resources needed. I don't think it'll automatically spot Tycho if I send him through, it doesn't feel like it has enough attention, so I should be able to gather more direct data if needed. There might be some essential weakness I can't see from here."

"Mine doesn't have enough attention for anything, but its counterpart might. We suspect it can see anything in all parallel realities of my world."

"Do you know if it's likely to attack Tycho? Most clairvoyants from non-daemon worlds think he's a slightly odd raven, or else a person currently in raven-shape." Tycho is also capable of running away really fast, and worse comes to worse she herself steps into that world, but that's something she'd rather avoid.

"It will probably not attack Tycho, but I can't predict it very well. If it notices Tycho at all, it'll notice that it's not a regular person, it can perceive things down to the atomic components."

"Interesting. That would complicate things; I'd rather not tip it off that something's going on, or provoke it. It's theoretically possible to have someone just precog the results, or create a throwaway timeline using timetravel magic or technology, but I don't have cheap and easy access to either at the moment. - Although when I'm around Security disproportionately includes people capable of time travel, they might be recruitable."

"...is there a particular reason for the time travel?"

"I'm not sure, the landlords don't answer calls." She suspects it's because if she gets going she gets increasingly hard to stop, making it easier to preemptively arrest her. Either that or weird coincidence, or the landlords fucking with her.