"Yes. Scion is a highly unpredictable variable, and we only barely understand why he does the things he does."

"Right. Well, we'll provide the resources we can - be capes, if screening for trustworthy buyers is a substantial constraint on formula distribution - and wait for heavier hitters to come help."

"I'm actually not sure how the formulas would interact with your biology, but then again, I'm not sure how it interacts with our biology. Mostly, though, we screen for usefulness rather than trust, Contessa can ensure the latter or something close to it."

"You still do turn a fair few villains, is that a tradeoff with something else?"

"They all owe us favors. We don't actually need the money—we set a price that's too high for any of them, and then lower it some in exchange for promises of favors, and that gives us leverage everywhere. We'd be much weaker if we only had power among the heroes."

"This is all very dubious but under some very desperate circumstances. Okay."

She gestures at Contessa. "Her Shard got safeguarded. Our only way of getting awesome resources is sabotaged by the very entities we're moving against. It's why I'm here—I'm definitely not influenced by Eden or Scion. We did not have time to run tests on what the best way to defeat the god-aliens was, so Contessa does not make plans, only Alexandria and I do, and we stick to them even if they're horrifying—for the survival of humanity."

"Been there, yeah. Is unsafeguarding her potentially possible with enough resources?"

"I would've said no, once, but 'enough resources' has suddenly taken a much broader meaning. No method known to us can do it, though."

"It might be worthwhile for some people to go explore neighboring dimensions from here, in case the peal can't find us but we can find someone with usefully applicable magic somewhere."

"How quickly can they explore new dimensions?"

"The bottleneck is making enough people teleport-capable and then Epic's time finding worlds within the new dimensions."

"So not very. I don't suppose Epic would be able to find the dimension he left from if he were directly adjacent to it?"

"Yeah, he could - anyone who lands in it could - just by trying to go to Warp."

"I wonder if it would be too much to hope for that Doormaker's doors allow us to cheat."

" - if he could get a door to all your neighbors, and Epic could walk in and try for Warp one by one -"

"He can get a door to all neighbors we have access to, which is not all of them because Scion blocks many of them, but it's possible that will work, yes."

" - let's do that right away, then. What does Scion block?"

"Access to certain worlds. We suspect he protects the worlds where he keeps his body, we've never been able to find it in any worlds we've seen or visited."

A door appears behind her, leading to a grassy field.

He walks in, tries to teleport to Warp. "Not this one."

Doormaker makes another door appear in front of him, and another, and another... a huge corridor of worlds extends ahead of him much farther than even Elf eyes can see.

He giggles and nods and steps through them and tries again and again and again -

Nope, nope, nope—

And again and again and again.

"I approve of the commitment to empiricism involved in running countries as military dictatorships to see what happens to work best. What was the plan once you decided what worked best?"