"...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."

"...yeah, definitely. Maybe I should just swear not to swear any mind-altering oaths..."

"That should probably also have some form of escape clause."

"Probably. But mind-altering ones are really bad, I can't think of a situation where they'd make sense -"

"And I couldn't think of extradimensional visitors with god powers, I think it's safe to never swear anything without an escape clause."

"...okay. All of you approving, for that one, and still none with unlimited duration?"

"I think so. And it might be a good idea to also add escape clauses involving your peal, when they arrive; you probably don't need to keep those oaths in place then."

"Yeah, I think I should start all of them with 'until my peal arrives' - maybe also something for if I make some people -"

"Until any other element of your peal is present in this world, perhaps?"

"...that's closer but then I could get out from any of them by making a person -"

"So we add an oath only permitting you to make a member of your peal with our say-so, too."

"...the main circumstance under which I can imagine needing to make a person is if you guys turned out to be secretly evil like Brazil."

"Reasonable. If you don't offload responsibility... you can still try to abuse words like 'genuine belief' and try to rely on not being around masters and strangers to the best of your ability. And definitely stay away from Sleeper."

"Promise. ...uh, until my peal finds me or I, in a location where there are no capes within a million miles, make a Space Elf whose fully informed evaluation of the situation is that this oath should be revoked, swear not to do the following things without the approval of three of Legend, Hero, Library of Alexandria, and Eidolon, overwhelming evidence that the fourth would approve and is unreachable or incapacitated, and evidence that I expect would be satisfying to Boots that I am not under the influence of mind-affecting powers or magic : swear an oath, give out my magic, or take any actions that would kill more than a hundred thousand people. Until my peal finds me or I, in a location where there are no capes within a million miles, make a Space Elf whose fully informed evaluation of the situation is that this oath should be revoked, I swear not to do the following things without evidence that I expect would be satisfying to Boots that I am not under the influence of mind-affecting powers or magic: make any use of my powers that is likely to kill people."

"Will you include something for mindreading?"

"....could, that one has more plausible cases where it's necessary -"

"It does. I'll leave it up to you. I don't expect it to come up that there is some piece of information we will desperately need and which can only be obtained via mindreading."

"- and they were a bad enough person it was justified - but, like, I might give my powers to people who are willing to let me voluntarily read their minds to check if they're secretly evil or something -"