"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.

"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."