Gav removes the hand out of his mouth. "Breathe, stop thinking retributive thoughts."

"I said clergyman, not peasant. You're not an idiot, you just know different things than me. There's still people having lots of children, yes, but the other preconditions of the prophecy won't be fulfilled for a couple of centuries. There was some astrological shit, and my mother herself had to be pretty powerful to have anything to pass down, and most people that powerful don't end up having more than a couple of kids."

"Oh, cool. We just got to this world and would be a shame if the good things about it were ruined, the overly nice people, the food, your cute face."

Herod will just, be quiet for a moment.

"Aw, thanks. The dark messiah isn't prophesied to destroy the world or anything, she's just gonna be really powerful. I guess if we get really unlucky she might try to destroy the world anyway, but most people don't."

"And she will only come in a few centuries. We will be in another world by then."

"If nobody's made us all immortal by then, at least. There's plenty of people working on the project of human immortality, you know. I'm sure one of them's going to get it eventually."

"I guess we will have to deal with the Dark Messiah then."

"Is that a magic thing or technology?"

“Both! Magic seems like a better bet, though.”

"That's because you have no faith in science," the boy in the visor says disapprovingly.

"This is true," Leo cheerfully admits.

"You don't think science can't help the understanding of magic even further?"

"Oh, no, magic science is great. But regular science has been trying to make people immortal for ages and nothing's happened."

Hakim pinches the bridge of his nose. "First of all, most of that work was before we had gadgeteers; second of all, magic's been trying even longer."

"And we've got multiple living immortals! It just doesn't scale yet. But that's an easier problem than 'never made anyone immortal in the first place'."

Gav giggles. "It's weird that you have it, as, two things. Magic and science that is."

"A bit, yeah. It's not really two... separate things, but we are from Middle Ages."

"Science and magic have been pretty thoroughly separated for the last couple hundred years. There was a period of a few centuries where all the magic kind of went away for various reasons, and that was when science really started picking up, so for a while there people just thought, well, gee, once we started looking hard enough there turned out not to be any magic, must have all been fake."

"Wow, that is... wild. I hope stuff like that doesn't affect our magic. The immortals were alright during that period?"

"Yeah, it wasn't like there just wasn't any magic anymore? More like the magic was hiding. Nowadays any clown can cast a spell-" (he claps Leo on the back) "-but in like 1700 you'd try to perform a ritual and if you weren't Circe or somebody it'd just fizzle."

"I see, does that stuff ever happens to technology?"

"Nope," Hakim says smugly. "Technology is much more generally reliable."

"Unless there's a solar flare. Or an EMP. Or a magnetic speedster within fifty feet of you."

Hakim grimaces. "It can be disrupted, yes. But unlike magic, it follows ironclad rules."

"Unless you're a Devisor."

"Devises aren't technology, they're Warper effects, I will die on this hill."

"Devisors sound more like magic than technology. They almost sound more like magic than your kind of magic."

"Yeah, Devisors are pretty fucked up."

"Hey," Hakim says mildly.

"Sorry," Leo says unapologetically. 

"Anyway, what everyone's else story. I understand that Leo's more locally interesting than Xan's, but I don't have a frame of reference."

"Xan hails from a nice middle-class family in California that loved him very much but has since updated in favor of him being a mutant menace, good riddance to them. Sky hails from a lower-class family in Kentucky that did not have particularly fond feelings for them even before they manifested. Hakim... I don't actually know anything about Hakim's family."

"And it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future," Hakim says. "Incomunicado."

"Incomunicado," Leo accepts. "Ariel was raised by a notorious supervillainess and killed her in a duel, then absorbed her powers, and was adopted by Sally's parents, who are extremely rich and love their children very much, both of which traits they share with my parents, though unlike my parents they are not also notorious supervillains."

"Congratulations on being a menace."

"For some reason I had assumed that you father wasn't in the picture," he tells Leo. "Do your parents have super-powers?" He asks, addressing Sally for the first time.