"Hmm...the Tesseract's unfriendly, Arda prophecies are unfriendly, Arda songs are friendly, Arda artifacts seem kind of neutral? Wishing's neutral, summoning and all of the magic about how the daeva worlds work seem friendly, except Limbo which is - neutral? No, it's both friendly and unfriendly in different ways, that's a bit different - Materia's unfriendly. Shine's servantmaking is friendly and the resurrection and baby-dropping are unfriendly. Hex's friendly. I don't know about other parahuman powers, haven't seen enough yet.

Based on how likely something is to malfunction, and how much the principles it runs on are explainable, and how hard it is to do things and whether it's harder to do bad things, and whether the way things are set up looks vaguely like there was a designer who wanted people to be able to use magic to achieve things -"

Hero looks faintly jealous, where "faintly" here means "incredibly." "Tesseract, isn't that just a four-dimensional analogue of a cube?—I'll ask about your magic later. I think pretty much all tinker powers are like this, but tinker stuff can be reverse-engineered. The principles though are basically impossible for other people to understand, and there's lots of papers about where powers come from, whether anyone made them—some people think Scion did—"

"Maybe I can ask him. Anyway, we'll figure out how to reverse engineer it, we've got a lot of ways to cheat at that -"

"Like what? And asking Scion—could you try to talk in his mind? He only ever said his name, once."

"Yeah, I can try to talk in his mind, easy. And we've got access to modern scanners and stuff, and I can make prototypes in varying states of disassembly and make lots of them for different researchers, that should help -"

"Oooh yeah, mass production of tinker stuff is very hard, each thing a tinker makes is unique—that's part of why it's so hard to get any understanding of the underlying principles."

"Well, we can fix that!"

"I think other powers are friendlier though. Library of Alexandria is probably immortal and has an eidetic memory, Legend is probably immortal too and has lots of control over his lasers and perfect vision, too. Eidolon is... I guess neutral? He gets whatever three or four powers his power thinks he needs."

"If it's good at picking that sounds friendly. But - those powers are stuck to those people, it's Tinker stuff that by rights ought to change the world -"

"It's not always obvious why the powers are good for the situation, even if they always do turn out to be. But I agree, tinker stuff would be awesome—and we shouldn't say they haven't, we've been able to reverse-engineer some smaller scale things and extrapolate from that, we got mobile phones and the internet—though I guess it's not anywhere as big as you seemed to think it would be, it has such potential—and miniaturization's getting some boosts here and there whenever someone manages to crack something a tinker made."

"The internet's going to be amazing, yeah. Not even all that far in the future, even without a boost - I can put satellites in orbit for you -"

"We'd probably need to work out infrastructure and how to scale things. Maybe. Not a lot of people have computers yet, anyway."

Nod. "Do you want a fancy future one? Not a chip-locked one until I've tested if that's safe for parahumans, but I can still get you the kind the Andalites use."

"Oh yeah, totally!"

Here is the kind of computer the Andalites use! It is about the size of a bar of chocolate and has the complete written works of Earth on it because why not. He shows him how to turn it on.

Oooh this is so cool those computers are really different and even better than some tinker ones though not all. "Does this have stuff the other Earths produced?"

"Nah, you want that too?"

"Yeah! I'm kinda curious about whether there's stuff that got produced that's the same even after Scion appeared. Could be useful to predict things."

He makes a thumb-sized data stick. "This is all the other Earths up through 2020, you'd need a bigger computer to fit stuff after that because the population makes a lot more media once the internet's really a thing but for comparison purposes it should do."

He nods and accepts the data stick.

"So what other cool things does the future and aliens bring us?"

"Uh, all of the more advanced Earths are pretty much post-scarcity, you might be able to pull that off with just one demon but you might not, humans are pretty populous for a species so you usually get to have a lot of sway in the galaxy, we should colonize Mars, Revelation has arcologies there and on the Moon..."

"Arcologies—we should totally colonize Mars and the Moon—but we still have the whole hunger problem—and the warlords problem—and people will probably still trigger on the Moon and we're not going at a sustainable rate—"

"What's not sustainable?"

"The rate of triggers. If we continue at this rate we're going to have way too many parahumans, and we already have had Behemoth, Glaistig Uaine, Gray Boy, Sleeper all on the side of the bad guys and most triggers turn out to become bad guys, which makes sense given what they are but..."

"Yeah. Maybe if your world was nice and post-scarcity then triggers'd be less likely to be bad guys?"