He sings. He goes outside after a while, keeps singing.

No one stops him or does anything. Some people stop on their tracks to listen, when he passes by them, but eventually move on.

After a while he takes to the air.

And after a while Eidolon joins him. Still as mind-silent as ever.

Hi.

Hello.

It's nice to meet you. Is there anyone you want me to sing for?

...no. All the people I failed to protect, maybe.

Okay. Someday we'll get them all back. Soon, if you can get a power that works with demon powers to do resurrection. They didn't sound sure anyone could but if anyone could it'd probably be you, I think.

Perhaps. I don't think my power could understand bringing people back as a need, in the relevant sense.

How does it decide, do you know?

What I need, always what I need, at the time. It has no foresight and no ability to tell me why I need whatever it is I need.

That's sort of cool, though. Like a puzzle.

I won't say I dislike my power, but it's somewhat difficult to enjoy the puzzle when I mostly need powers to use in situations where time is a scarce resource.

Like fighting Behemoth? Or are there other problems like that? Does it not give you powers for, like, world hunger?

Like fighting Behemoth or other threats, yes. It does not seem to think I need to solve world hunger.

That must be frustrating.

Well now it is, he doesn't send.

Yes. I feel like there's more I could do, should do, and I can't.

Yeah. I'm so mad at myself I didn't think of some way to get resurrection, I wish I'd studied the economic history of Warp and Revelation, there's just so much to fix and even if we can fix it all there's so many people dying in the meantime...

Are other Earths safer?

Wish is perfectly safe, no one dies permanently unless they want to do and Mîr's post-scarcity and it's not hard to immigrate to Mîr so most places on Earth that weren't giving their people a good life had to shape up. Warp's where I live and its Earth is post-scarcity too and they've still got death but we're working on fixing that and T'Mir saved thirty-five billion lives before we even met her.

No, I meant—at this time. Without parahumans, without Behemoth, is the Earth better without us?

Most Earths at this time have something else weird going on - vampires, or magical girls, or aliens invading- I think a baseline 1994 Earth would be more peaceful than yours but we can change that now.

He shakes his head. We had such hopes. The golden age of heroes, powers to help everyone, bring us up and forward.

But then people kept being villains?