"How about the year-old one?"

Hero picks it up gingerly and looks at it. "I've literally not touched it—I'm not indestructible if it explodes but you have healing so maybe that's not much of a problem..." And in the manner of tinkers all over the world, he shoots.

It does, in fact, explode. Not a huge explosion, just enough for it to get reduced to its component parts and to give Hero some third degree burns.

Tap-heal.

"Huh. Okay, so there's something different about it but we don't know what it is -"

"Yeah. If I look at it I know what to do to fix it, but I can't really explain it afterwards in a way that makes sense to anyone but me and I couldn't have predicted it in advance anyway."

"That's annoying. Sort of - hostile -"

"Hostile?"

"Like, some kinds of magic are user-friendly, and some are neutral, like the laws of physics, and some are user-unfriendly - yours seems user-unfriendly -"

"...huh. I never thought of it that way but I guess it makes sense? You've seen lots of supernatural things, is most of it friendly?"

"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?"