"Doubt it."

Doesn't go.

"Can't, sorry."

"Reading Scion periodically might be a good idea, anyway."

"Unless he eventually notices that."

"If your thing's magical he's unlikely to, unless he reads your mind but that'd be expensive for him to do. It may however be too high a risk, you're right."

"What things are expensive for him, how do we know that?"

"The information we have of him comes from trigger events and people who get powers using our formulas," Doctor Mother explains. "We get a glimpse of a moment in the entities' life when that happens, and Cauldron is in a position to collect many of these stories. The entities are very aware of the energy cost of everything they do, and measure it in how much time less they'll have to live. The rarer the power, the more it seems to cost them—precogs are extremely uncommon, whereas fliers crop up everywhere. And we have no record of anything close to mindreading ever happening."

"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 -"