" - thanks."

Cam hurry

- and there's Cam and then they're back in Warp.

- and Boots is scooping him up and squeezing him.

"Scion could kill trillions and trillions of people if he gets mad do something  -" and he starts sobbing and clings to her.

"Of course, Cam'll go right back -"

"No, I'm sending Golden."

Golden shows up.

She goes to meet Scion.

Here's Jesus, golden edition. He looks at the new arrival expressionlessly for a second then asks, "Can you bring her back?"

"We could try."

"Thank you."

"We're going to want to be very sure, first, that this doesn't cause any planets to explode or anyone to die or anything like that."

Another second's pause, then "Yes."

"How do you propose that we be sure of that?"

The entity looks. This person is not an entity, or if she is, she has powers it cannot detect, working through means it is unaware of. It cannot generate hypotheses as to why, not in such a short time. What it does know is that she slips away from its detection, and it looks, what does it have to do to win—

—it fails. It cannot get any data, it cannot run any simulations including this person—not even it is immune to simulation, not unless it's crippled a shard just like its counterpart must have crippled the suited woman's. It again cannot generate hypotheses other than the obvious ones—maybe she crippled it without its noticing, maybe she is so much huger than it that its processors just can't wrap around her head at all.

This entity is at her mercy, and it may not be the thinker, but it is the warrior, and the warrior knows when he is outclassed and outmatched.

"We just want the universe not to die."

"It's not going to."

"Our calculations suggest it will in approximately one hundred trillion of this planet's years."

"How confident are you that you took everything into account?"

...this entity has a lot of information about this. But the not-entity cannot receive it no matter how it sends it. Making do with words is not sufficient, but it does not know how to best translate these concepts without simulating how they are received.

"Not. It is the reason for the cycle," is what it eventually decides to say.

"The cycle being the thing where you repeatedly kill huge numbers of people after giving them powers for a while."

"Yes."

"That's going to have to stop."

"We have not yet found a way to prevent the universe from ending."

"We have lots of entropy-breaking magic."

"Will you use it?"

"We use it all the time. Whether we use it here depends a lot on whether you can be relied on to hold up your end of a bargain."