"I see. And he's told you the executive summary of the situation?"

"He did. If it changes any of your planning we sincerely expect to have contact with this world by the end of the year and after that all of your governments will have to function given the capacity of all your citizens to leave at any time for nice alien-run places."

"So your sincere advice right now is 'do nothing for another few months'?" asks Bernardo curiously.

"I don't have enough details. But if the doing is likely to cause a lot of damage and the harms are mostly ones that would be hard to swiftly alleviate even if you succeed, then yes."

"While your—appearance—is more than Epic's say-so, it's still a lot to ask."

He nods. "What do your plans look like?"

"We do not currently have plans beyond trying different things to inform the people and hoping someone who triggers a power that can work around Awe."

"Who's that and what do they do -"

"Short answer is we don't know. Long answer is we can't spread news, can't communicate effectively, emails get lost, transmissions from other countries are filtered before they ever get here... Anything that's not in person can be intercepted or modified."

"- huh. Epic -"

"Haven't observed it to affect me but maybe I wouldn't. Contessa ought to know about it."

"—the Contessa?" asks John after Bernardo translates this, sounding alarmed.

"I don't know if there are two, I haven't been here very long and I've been busy."

"Appears out of nowhere, takes someone down, or does something weird, disappears later, doesn't seem to have any powers except no one can ever hit her and she can take down even the most powerful—"

Bernardo dutifully translates all of this for Maitimo.

" - yeah that'd be her."

"She's part of your organization." That's not a question.

"She's not part of my interdimensional humanitarian organization but she's part of the social-experiment one, yeah."

"And what's she for?"

"She's trying to prevent the destruction of the world."

" - kiddo are you just telling them lots of highly critical secrets -"

"People they care about got tortured for Cauldron's social experiment, they deserve to know."

"I got tortured!" Bernardo chirps cheerily. "I hope that datum helped someone!"

Jade pats his arm.

"Uh huh. So yeah, Contessa works for that organization and she gave me instructions on how to get what I wanted in Brazil so I assume if my information was getting filtered she'd have said."

"We don't know how our info gets filtered," says John. "It's always perfectly explainable, but the coincidences—mount."

- nod.