"I mean, I was planning to camp out anyway, but if it keeps me that long there goes the fantasy of you making all the S9 members march themselves to the Birdcage unless you want to wait too."

"Gimme a specific example of an evil thing they've done."

"The Slaughterhouse Nine? Well, nobody's figured out how to save Gray Boy's victims, yet, they're in time-looped eternal torture. Another supervillain eventually killed him."

"Yeah, I think we can camp out a couple of days."

nod

"Good."

"My magnetism is...really, really strong, actually, and my sister is a fuckoff powerful telepath, so yeah, we can probably clean up more than just this one group if you do have a list."

"There's an entire condemned city where Nilbog was quarantined... I'm curious to know if you could, but terrified to suggest, that you could try some telepathy on the Simurgh quarantine zones. You won't convince anyone to unquarantine them and I don't know if she leaves telepathically visible marks, but if you could find out what exactly happened to the people inside... There's a Simurgh victim on the S9, too, you wouldn't necessarily have to detour to the quarantines."

"Which one?"

"Goes by Mannequin. Tinker. Used to be working on self-contained environments with a view to space colonization. Simurgh killed his family and drove him insane."

"...Ick. Um, yeah, noted."

"I am simultaneously impressed and appalled by how much higher stakes your world's superscene is compared to ours," Marie says.

"I do have days where I just sit in my workshop for hours, programming robots to do my homework and working on my dad's suit, but yeah, sounds like you've got various flavors of idyll."

"Multiversal evidence actually suggests that my world narrowly dodged a highly martial civil rights movement that might or might not have ended in genocide robots. I mean, we still sort of ended up with the movement, but it was significantly less necessary, and we're pretty sure the robots have been comprehensively averted."

"My world no longer has most of Japan. Not to turn it into a contest."

"Sorry, I was agreeing with you."

"She intended to emphasize 'averted' more than she ended up doing. Apparently most of the worlds of our type at least see the robots coming into existence, even if they never reach the genocide stage."

"We don't have any of those in particular that I've heard of, but there's a lot to keep track of even for people who follow cape events really closely. Tinkers all have specialties, and robots aren't that common when you could also get, say, guns, or plants, or software, or musical instruments, or weird vaguely alchemical products of common kitchen ingredients."

"The robots are apparently perfectly mundane technology, actually."

"Huh."

"Is tinkertech not?"

"I mean, sort of, we need parts - usually, anyway, some biotinkers can do stuff with their bare hands and own bodies - and there's usually a mechanism behind whatever it's doing, but no one else understands what we're doing except for other tinkers with similar specialties, no one else can reproduce the tech - whether they just literally can't or no one has ever been exact enough in following the assembly steps, I don't know - and no one else can maintain the tech. If I make you an ash-cleaning robot it will suck electricity out of your wall or live on the ashes it eats up or something, and when anything goes wrong with it, it won't work, and you won't be able to fix it, but if I did invent one maybe Bar could make it even though it's almost magic?"

I can only sell things that are in some meaningful sense 'available for sale' somewhere. I might be able to find an object with similar effects, and if you made and sold at least three of the same design and did not construe them as being limited edition when so doing I could perhaps sell copies. It doesn't count as magic but almost always does count as too unique.

"What I actually meant was that their invention wasn't accomplished using any kind of inventing things super power."

"Huh. Non-tinker robotics is mostly confined to industry, not warfare, back home."