"And Scion's too unstable to negotiate with, even though we have the thing he wants."

"The thing he wants, probably, is Eden. The entities were very specialized, and Eden was the planner and long-term thinker. Her you might have been able to negotiate with."

" - the peal has resurrection, but -"

"—yes, Epic mentioned that. It might not even turn out to be necessary, there are probably even some parahuman powers that could heal Eden enough."

"But you're presuming that to be unwise?"

"Yes. She might have enough control over the Shards we've taken to cause trouble before we can notice she's doing anything, and it's not unlikely upon seeing you she'll just decide to co-opt your resources rather than wait for your peal, given that our precognition doesn't work off-neighborhood."

"Same goes for contacting other entity-pairs?"

"They don't have power to affect us here but I don't expect the tactical considerations are meaningfully different."

"Do you expect people would trigger on Mars or the Moon?"

"Yes; this solar system is well within the entities' reach."

"Then it seems like you might have some problems even without Behemoth and the like, just from more and more people triggering."

"If the current rates keep up, heroes will be outnumbered two to one by the two thousand and tens, but we also have control of many criminal parahuman organizations, and most parahumans we cannot in fact hope to control are not invisible to Contessa. We already had a... plan... for Gray Boy, in case Epic failed."

"Control of the criminal organizations is so you can keep those people around for an eventual fight?"

"Yes, and so we can keep them less numerous. If things run their natural course, most criminal groups are fractured and small, whereas we can ensure they're larger and more organized and likely to not devolve into bloody gang wars."

"What sort of activities do you have them occupied with?"

"We do not have that active a hand on them, most of them aren't actually aware of how much control we have. If they start causing too much trouble we can bring sanctions on them, though—some actually have deals with us for formulas, while others just rely on the Number Man for their accounting, and Contessa can hack any bank accounts trivially."

"The whole 'heroes and villains' thing, is that organic or was it prodded into existing -"

"Organic. Long before Scion showed up there was already a cultural notion that people with superpowers became superheroes, and the first people with powers followed the script. We only started existing as a proper organization after that—we'd only been collecting resources and knowledge, before."

"Couple places had relatively good handling of the escalating numbers of powered persons but I don't know how many of them transfer cross-species. I can forward you the records anyway."

"That would be very good, thank you. Although I'm not sure the species is the main problem, here—natural triggers are in fact more conflict-prone than average, both due to selection effects and because the Shards encourage this, so it's not just more powered people, they're also by default less stable."

"There's still a fair bit of variance by species in murder rates and conflict and so on - a couple places had a nuclear war near-immediately, congratulations on avoiding that..."

"Scion's responsible for avoiding that, actually, he stopped the Cold War short."

"Do you have any idea how he sets his priorities?"

"None at all. He seems to alternate between disaster relief and rescuing kittens from trees at near-random."

"That I was apprised of. Stopping the Cold War seems kind of more directed than either of those things - it requires understanding potential dangers -" Frown.