"I did not mean you'd kill me, I meant entropy would. As for consultation—I will of course do what I can but that may turn out to be very little. The first time we ran into another of our kind in a very long time was when we were first arriving on Earth and it was not unlike meeting aliens of yet another species."

"How so?"

"I expect from your perspective that would not be the case—the other entity was also a mass of shards with a variety of ways of driving other species insane and then eating them. But it was similar to us in the same way, perhaps, certain apes are similar to humans: evolved from the same ancestor. It had split off before our kind discovered the strategy of specialising and cooperating, like Scion and I do, but was thus significantly more efficient and had different kinds of powers. Many of which I acquired, too, and passed on to humans to study."

"We have circumstantial evidence and local observer analysis of your species to go on. Maybe you could provide more depth."

"I suppose I perhaps could, yes."

"If you want to trade information we can work out terms."

"Oh, no, that's not what I was saying at all, I think it's a good idea to share this information with you anyway, you're the solution to all of our problems, if you really have the abilities you claim to have."

"I'm not sure how that's in question."

"I believe humans have a saying—any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? None of what I've observed so far strictly implies the entropy-breaking capabilities you claim to have, although if other worlds are sufficiently numerous and different and out of sync it might just be that the question is moot."

"That too."

"Still. It would be—reassuring to be offered some more evidence in that direction."

"Do you have something in mind?"

"My ability to come up with hypotheticals only goes so far, especially given what little we've observed."

"You've observed some magic. If those demonstrations weren't convincing I'm not sure why other ones should be if you can't define what you're looking for."

"You could start by telling me what you can do, but if that is out of the question, my only real goal here is figuring out how entropy is going to be defeated."

"One of the more portable powers allows the creation of arbitrary material objects. It's got a speed limit but it fits the description."

"—and it does not fetch this matter from other universes?"

"No."

"Was that the power my counterpart saw the little winged one using? He assumed Epic had been fetching it from other universes but since it appears we do have access to all of our neighborhood..."

"Little winged one actually has an inferior variant power based on a better original but he isn't fetching it from other universes either."

"Well. That would be quite sufficient. There's no limit at all?"

"Only of rate of speed of production of matter per producer. Planet-in-a-few-weeks kind of rate. If they all wanted to hang out producing planets all the time, which is a taller order."

"And other people cannot obtain this power?"

"You could get little-and-winged's version, possibly."

"That would solve all of our problems very neatly."