"Ugh. Yeah, that sounds about right."

"People," Sally sighs. "Well, that's something to be proud of, I suppose. Go Earth."

"It seems like a very nice planet!"

"For the most part it is! The part we're in is nicer than many others, even, we're not at war and there's a good standard of living and superheroes enjoy a solid majority over supervillains."

"Hey!" Xan says indignantly. "There's no need to be partisan."

Leo rolls his eyes. "It's a perfectly legitimate way to measure quality of life and you know it, Xan, don't be a dick."

"Some of you are planning to be supervillains?"

"Leo and I. We're not gonna, like, kill people, but we've got some disagreements with the establishment."

"What disagreements do you have that you want to express with nonmurderous supervillainy?"

"Where do I fucking start," Xan snorts. "Uh, the Crystal of Sa'Koresh is on display in the New York Museum of Natural History, instead of somebody using it to kill Deathlist or something. Same with thousands of other powerful artifacts scattered through the museum collections of the world, but the Crystal particularly gets me because they know how useful it could be and they still don't want anybody using it because they think it's too powerful to be in the hands of any one person. That's kind of - not the root problem but it points at it?"

"What does it do? The Crystal."

"Empowers one person with the powers of whoever Sa'Koresh was - flight, strength, intelligence, magical power, probably some other stuff. It was donated to the museum after the death of its previous holder, a supervillain by the name of Redoubt."

"And you're really sure that it doesn't make people who have it supervillains or anything like that, because that's what I'd expect if I heard of something like this sitting in a museum on the Prime Material."

"Can't strictly speaking rule it out, but the historical Sa'Koresh was a hero, Redoubt was just kind of a dick."

"Huh. Okay. And - that concentration of power is actually unusual, or just one of the only concentrations you can theoretically keep away from people?"

"It's high-percentage, but Ariel's about as powerful as Redoubt was and nobody's throwing her in a black cell."

"Black cell?"

"Uh, oubliette? It's where you put really bad supervillains you can't kill and people whose powers are uncontrollable and apocalyptic."

"How's that work?"

"Time-freezing magic, I think? It's not exactly public record, I just know that's where they put Maelstrom and Tearaway and stuff like that."

"I am so behind on all the cultural knowledge here."

“Maelstrom and Tearaway were big-time mutant terrorists back in the 50s. Maelstrom was a psi and a blaster, Tearaway ate people. They were seriously bad news. Then they got captured by the Mystic Six and tossed in a black cell, where to the best of my knowledge they remain to this day.”

"Are there a lot of movies about something going wrong with the black cells and plucky heroes having to defeat all the villains of yesteryear?"

“Thrillers prefer making up their own mutant villains. Less chance of survivors’ advocacy groups boycotting you.”

"That makes sense." Her Kharoline frybread is all gone. "I think I'm due for powers testing soon, but it was nice to meet you all."