"Such a case is not particularly more likely to come up for a thousand than for a million people except inasmuch as it's a consequence of human population densities. How complex can your oaths be, and what happens if you forget any part of it?"

"I have an eidetic memory."

"So we could get a few different let's call them security levels."

"Yeah."

"Any action that would kill upwards of a million should require at least three out of the four of us to agree, plus a genuine belief that the fourth is either compromised or otherwise impossible to get a hold of in the relevant time frame. Upwards of a thousand should require at least two out of the four of us to agree, no need for the compromise clause. Upwards of a hundred, at least one. Upwards of one, you should be as certain as you can possibly be that this action prevents more harm than it causes, and have done your best to look for alternatives. How much mileage can you get out of liberal use of phrases like 'genuine belief' and 'level best'?"

"Won't help if people can change what I believe, unless you expect I'd know if I was being mind-controlled -"

"Changing what you believe is difficult—most master and stranger powers don't actually touch your mind and the ones that do are not typically that powerful—so this would cover the majority of cases. I don't expect there's a phrasing tight enough it would cover all possible situations."

"Yeah, probably not. That one sounds good until my peal comes. ...if things go horribly somehow you should write a letter to Cam, tell my peal they need to get here now -"

"...would they try to come faster, depending on what you wrote?"

"Yeah, definitely, like, they could always have a hundred people try to wish up a tracking power but that's a waste of a hundred peoples' wishes as long as I'm pretty much okay and this world's not on the brink of extinction or anything - and also the wish is likelier to go through if there's real danger - if I had messaged them that I was in a really dangerous situation or that this world was about to get destroyed or something then they'd throw all their resources at it and probably find me sooner."

"How close to extinction would count as 'on the brink,' in your opinion?"

"...uh, I think the top of the priority list for our fungible resources right now is projects which in expectation save about a hundred thousand lives per alt-day invested, or a thousand per random-Elf-day, and I think wishes get priority if in expectation they save more than a million lives, so it'd be worth burning a hundred wishes to come here a year sooner if that were 10% likely to save a billion people? Or if it saved me because they love me - that'd be really stressful, though, I'd feel like I had to be worth it -"

"How long do you expect them to take to get here, by default?"

"I have no idea. Might be a couple years, if I'm okay and the obvious avenues don't pan out."

"The world is probably not going to end in a couple of years. If it starts pushing a decade I might want to ask for some more urgency, however."

"...okay. Um. What's going to happen in a decade?"

"Hopefully, nothing, but we have access to a very good mathematician and some very worrying numbers."

"...huh. Okay. ...might be worth them coming sooner in case whatever the problem it's hard to solve even with their powers..."

"The problem is the rate at which parahumans trigger, and the proportion of them that ends up becoming villains. It's not sustainable, and if Behemoth was a trigger or created by a trigger, we're looking at an end-of-the-world scenario in about forty years."

"...so then if your powers have an adjacency limit we can solve a lot of it by just taking people out-of-dimension..."

"Yes—but if they're not, some other solution will be necessary and an interdimensional consortium of gods seems like just what we need."

"Yeah, they'll fix it." Flap flap. And he writes out the discussed oath and looks over it for problems.

"Are there any other powers of yours we might want to restrict with an oath?"

"Not reading minds, I guess?"

"That's a possibility, yes. And perhaps the very act of swearing oaths."