And Legend, while not the official team leader, is still fully capable of addressing at least the surface-level details of integration with one of these consortia—presumably not all with Boots, who said she was here mostly for Epic.

Other Bells are capable of doing basic onboarding work and feel sufficiently confident in their mental defenses to operate in the world.

Speaking of mental defenses, turns out the way thinker powers and precognition works is by brute-force simulating the future with a lot of fidelity. Contessa's power is basically simulating all worlds until it finds one where her goals are achieved, for instance. The reason thinker powers interfere with each other is a specific routine to avoid infinite reflections of each other.

"Well, that's fucked up. Initial assessment on the feasibility of making them all cut it out?"

They will probably be extremely unhappy about it! Contessa in particular won't, she finds herself relieved about being put out of commission, but most thinkers use their power as much or more as they use their regular senses. It would be akin to blinding them.

"Volunteers to go get a magic rock style replacement wished on?"

Depends on how they PR this, they were not really planning on telling everyone about how Scion was an alien who wanted to eat them and that makes it somewhat harder to share the info that also their powers run simulations. Do the various consortia have tried-and-true methods of broadcasting how lots of people will need to choose between going to another universe to make a wish and going blind?

Inconveniently, no, this will be breaking new ground. She has experience telling people they have to stop eating humans but that's really sort of different despite the emotional importance of eating humans to some vampires.

It also doesn't help that Cauldron doesn't actually run the world, it just has a lot of influence, political and otherwise. Do they have a way to send a message to every thinker? Because otherwise regardless of the strategy they will in fact accidentally miss some people.

"What I'm hoping to do is a trial run to see if a wished-on version works. We want a batch of maybe five to fifteen, I'm hoping one Thinker's wish can cover several others. Once it's determined whether or not that works, then if it does, someone whose converted power works to track down other Thinkers can be signed on to do that, and if it doesn't we need a new plan."

Cauldron definitely has the resources to call on fifteen Thinkers of lots of different flavors.

Ones who ideally feel strongly about replacing Thinker powers with versions that don't casually create and kill people.

Does "feel strongly about not losing their power" count?

It'll probably do if they're willing to channel it appropriately.

Yup, can do.

And they can go over wording and wish for replacement powers!

It turns out two of them are sufficiently dependent on/desperate about their power that they can in fact cover everyone who has loosely similar powers.

Well then, one of them can make this wish for this batch and the other can maybe do a future batch.

And how do the replacements fare?

At first it seems like it's just a straight-up replacement with no side effects.

But after enough time it'll become pretty obvious that they're getting noticeably less conflict-seeking.

Well, this side effect - or reversal thereof - can be warned for.

Most of the people who are against it are the sorts who you don't really want seeking more conflict than necessary anyway.

"Well, I don't normally base my willingness to alter people's emotional proclivities on how I'd rather they be but since this is plausibly the work of an alien parasite and if they keep using their powers zillions of people are forked only to promptly cease to exist I can relax that a bit."

In that case they will achieve a complete replacement of all simulation-based powers with similar magic-based ones.

There's still the matter of how the entities literally use those things to think.

"About that, you managed to talk to me and I can't be simulated. You must have something else going on."

"I have interacted with enough humans—simulated and otherwise—to be able to reliably mimic your speech patterns and communicate without needing to actually simulate anyone. It's a bit subtler than that, though—just like humans imagine possible situations in order to plan for them or respond to them, so do we, but with more detail."