"Yeah."

"And they presumably can provide more evidence than you can?"

"Only insofar as they are themselves evidence, actually. Honestly it's mostly that this is a frustrating conversation and I'd rather you have it with Maitimo."

"Trust me, it is just as frustrating to me, this was supposed to be fairly straightforward and I wasn't supposed to have to talk to you anytime soon. Why don't I just gather a couple of people who should hear what you have to say like you suggested?"

"That works too."

"Bernardo, why don't you get him somewhere comfortable while I go do that?"

"—sure, yes."

"Is it going to be an uninterrupted hour."

"Hm? No, it's gonna be like ten, fifteen minutes."

"Okay." 

He starts leading Epic somewhere and it soon becomes clear this building is a repurposed mansion. They go to what probably used to be an office—it has a few comfortable sofas and a table in the middle and some bookshelves against the walls.

He folds his wings up and sits down and sings to himself quietly.

After a few minutes the woman returns with a couple more people. "I neglected to introduce. I'm Mônica, and for all intents and purposes in charge here. You've met Bernardo, this is John," she gestures at a twentysomething guy with a metal mask, "and this is Jade," and that's a twentysomething girl with a metal mask. "Why don't you start from the beginning?"

" - I'm not sure if that's the best place to start, but okay. I was born in a world called Arda, which has magic, and then there was an interdimensional transit accident and Boots landed on us from another dimension with different magic, and that is how we learned there are different dimensions. There might be infinitely many of them. Some have magic and even the ones with physics often have different physics. And the one Boots was from has magic that is highly exploitable if you're anywhere where it's safe to experiment with it. So we used it to develop interdimensional transit and went to our most populous neighbor and started a magic humanitarian organization there, and then after a while we ran across some other people who'd done the same thing. And some dimensions have powerful and useful magic, or kinds that are very exploitable in combination with other kinds, so - well. I can make arbitrary material objects, I can teleport anywhere in a dimension or between dimensions, I can go invisible and make things and people invisible and do instantaneous perfect healing and turn people into birds and do illusions, I can distribute magic songs that do things like healing and accelerated perception and weather control, I can read minds with a range of like ten miles - I'm not doing that - and I am invulnerable to any kind of physical injury, I have teleported into the cores of stars because I was having a tantrum. I can resurrect some species of people but not humans. And the organization I am from can give almost all of those abilities out to anyone they want to have them."

"What's the but?" asks John.

"Lost 'em. Travelling between dimensions works according to rules and something went wrong and none of the ones I know of can be reached from here. They have enough magic that they can still be looking in on everything I'm doing, and they're trying to find us and I'm sure they will before the year is out. And I'm making something that'll help us find them, too. But right now they can't get to me so it's just me which is not great because I am actually a little kid I'm not just assuming that form for some reason."

"Little kid who knows mechanical engineering."

"I have a bunch of cognitive enhancements and even without them I'm usually the smartest person in my home world and if you want to make stuff that doesn't fall down without just copying you need to know mechanical engineering. And my species ages slower than humans, I'm older than six or seven Earth years I'm just not developmentally maturer than a six or seven year old human."

"Uh huh."

    "...you fixed Bernardo's face, right?" asks John.

"Yeah."

"They did that to him."

"Most times there are people who hate each other both of them can point at really horrible things the other side did."

"Not torture," says Jade, sounding horrified. "We don't tie people to cars and drag them around the city!"

" - okay, yes, often only one side does things like that."

    "And it's theirs."

"And you wish to work within their system," Mônica says. "As opposed to toppling it."

"I mean, if you have a really good alternative then sure, all yours. But - toppling is the easy part."