"You'd think so but Elves also have a really startlingly low crime rate."

"What do they do for those few cases, then?"

"...they don't cope well. But it honestly can just not come up for hundreds of years at a time."

"—that low. Huh. I don't suppose they've come up with acceptable alternatives? Although, really, most of the parahumans who we'd imprison would be harmless without their powers."

"They really aren't a good place to go for coping skills unless you go in for, like, personality editing by bizarrely-psychologied deities or alternatively centuries of warfare."

"I'd sooner skip that." He looks at Epic again. "Do you need anything? Or want anything? I feel rather—extraneous, here."

"The peal is good at finding ways for people to be doing meaningful things. They will find you some if you want."

Not quite what he meant, but he nods anyway.

"You have a well-liked widely renowned public persona, for one thing, that's useful! We can do 'benevolent aliens are here to change all the everything', but it might be good to have an introduction by one or more locals."

"The PRT and the Protectorate would be who you'd want backing you up there, yes. Only in the Western world, though, China is unlikely to care. ...but Cauldron is probably behind them, too."

"Maybe Butterfly knows some Chinese people with alts here she can talk to or something, she rules her Earth from China for reasons."

"Given how much Earth Bet has diverged from Earth Aleph just due to Scion's arrival in the seventies I would find that unlikely, but on the other hand your worlds from what Epic tells me" (he glances at the boy when mentioning him) "are remarkably similar for some reason in spite of having had much earlier changes to their timelines."

"I'm not even expecting timeline similarity, I'm expecting alts. Did Epic explain those?"

"I explained how the Maitimo I made was sort of my son but not in the sense where I made him."

"So in addition to there being more Fëanáros, most of whom are adults with children, there are more of lots of other people - said children, but also unrelated people like me."

"Do you have any idea why these people repeat like that? We have repeats only up to world divergences; everyone who was alive prior to Scion's appearance and hasn't died since is in at least Aleph and Bet."

"No, we don't know why. They happen a bunch of different ways - it actually wouldn't surprise me if in your diverged worlds some alts appeared in different places with different faces, my alts come in various ethnicities and can be boys, and only sometimes have the same parents. Different templates seem to be differently picky about their conditions. We haven't done a lot of very careful research here because finding them requires bottlenecked magical attention, so we just look for people who've previously distinguished themselves. There's also sort of - nonperson templates, like Earths are common. Though usually one at a time, this bunch of them all glommed together is new."

"There might be yous I could check if you want."

"I'm... not sure. In what sense is someone with a different appearance and life conditions altogether another one of you? And separately I believe Hero would enjoy being a part of this conversation."

"Epic, do you want to ask Hero if we should go get him? Anyway, we have the same personality and inclinations, we think the same way. It might be clearer after you've met several, depending on how your people-reading skills are. Maitimos are really good at noticing when someone's an alt of someone else."

Hey Hero the world's saved and we're talking want to come?

Are you joking I'm on my way.

"At any rate, interfacing with China and wherever else is definitely one of the things the ethically dubious shadow organization I mentioned could help you with, alts or no alts."

"Great! Always nice not to have to stretch staff capacity farther than we have to, training's still not infinitely quick at churning out professional miscellaneouses from Mîr and culturally desensitized Elves and such."

A few minutes later there's a sonic boom that mysteriously doesn't break anything, a feeling of slight acceleration, and a metal suit painted in gold with a helmet lands in front of the house.