"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."

"I have a countrywide organization dedicated to that, yes we have an alternative. We'd love to communicate with external aid, too, like the Protectorate, but Awe won't let us."

"I'm not sure how helpful they'll be but I can probably put you in touch with them."

"—of course you can. You expect them not to help?"

"There's an organization that arranged for all kinds of different governments, including Brazil's, to see what worked best at building stable superhero teams, and Alexandria and Legend and Hero are in on it. They didn't all know all the stuff it was doing but they knew some of it."

"Interdimensional consortiums, fine, but at this point I really need some evidence."

"I don't care very much if you believe me. Anyway I'm not sure whether like - it seems like maybe 'the dictatorship gets overthrown' is evidence about whether the dictatorship is a good way to run a country, and if you discount that form of evidence you kind of miss the point."

"So they won't help us because we're a social experiment and that would mess with control," Bernardo sums up.

"Probably, yeah. But I don't really approve of this kind of social experiment so after verifying the torture stuff I will probably help you if you want. I miss Boots."

"They sent us the videotapes," she says bitterly.

" -wow. Uh, my organization has resurrection. Once they find us."

"...very nice of it. Would you like to watch the videotapes, or send them to your Maitimo to confirm this?"

" - I will send them to Maitimo."

"Do we even need to give them to you, if you can make anything out of matter?" wonders Bernardo.

"No but I need something to specify - if they're called something, or if they arrived on a particular day, that'd do it. Otherwise I'd have to make lots of extra stuff and search through it."

"We have them on files—" And he lists a few serial numbers. "Should I write these down?"

"Nah, eidetic memory." He makes a tiny computer chip.

So he rattles off more serial numbers. There are a few dozens of them, and he doesn't skip a beat to list them, even though he doesn't have an eidetic memory.