"...Oh dear."

"Yeah."

"Well, at least you seem to already be against it. You may be pleased to know we got rid of that."

"Delighted to hear it!"

"I'd like to thank any gods currently listening that I didn't have to explain why slavery is bad today."

"So I shouldn't put on my most convincing impression of a hardline slavery partisan?"

"...now I'm actually curious. Maybe you can give me the talking points without the impression?"

"Their strongest argument is probably that being able to put yourself up as collateral means that no free person is ever fully without access to credit?"

"Oh, that's a much better reason than we had, I thought they'd be leaning on the inherent inferiority of goblins or somesuch. Unless that's also in play. Also that's still a terrible reason, to be clear."

"There's enslavement of a lot of species and some of them are in fact what happens when a delver doesn't kill everybody in a place they're raiding, but the collateral thing is in play."

"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?"