Guerra purses his lips at that, but Hero just looks enthralled.

"But not being there limits our options somewhat," says Legend. He turns to Guerra. "Has Epic shown you enough evidence you're willing to entertain the idea for long enough for us to actually start planning what to do with his resources?"

    "Perhaps..." the Deputy Chief Director says.

"In that case I don't think there's much more for us to discuss here—we are none of us best suited for figuring out how to best deploy powers like Epic's and even if we were, this is not something to be done in the middle of the night on a Saturday." Guerra tilts his head, conceding this. "So," Legend continues, looking at Epic now, "what do you want to do?"

"Uh - I could terraform a planet for villains and experiment with using shaped biofilters to get, like, containment cells that still let them talk to each other? The hard part would be that some powers probably interfere with biofilters, but it'd work for villains whose powers definitely wouldn't do that. I want to give everyone in the world a recording of the magic healing song I have, do you have an internet yet? I'll just put it on the internet if you do. ...the magic healing song's not nearly as good as the touch healing but it's better than nothing." He looks at the guy with a gun. "...I have twenty-third century stun weapons? They're nicer than guns and I can give you a bunch."

    "We have some stun weapons! But they don't really work on the villains we can't really contain..." sighs Hero.

"I meant what do you want to do right now—we should discuss and plan now before making any decisions, so it's best if we don't deploy your abilities quite yet," Legend explains.

"Okay. Um, I guess talk about who I need? I need some people who are good at science who can take the future physics textbooks and devices and diagrams and figure out how to build them on your infrastructure base. I need some people who know a lot about powers so I can think about things I might do and they can tell me if some powers could get around that. I would really like to do all the normal things you'd do for an Earth in 1994 like cure lots of diseases and replace all your factory farms with lab-grown - you don't have a global warming problem yet but you're going to in a couple of decades - 

- oh, and some commercial people to sell all the stuff I make so I can have lots of money for things I might want to do that require money?"

He nods. "We can probably get you a lot of that tomorrow—"

    "I can talk about physics with him!" Hero says.

"Yes, you can, but you will need to sleep soon because you've been awake for the past thirty-five hours."

    Hero grumbles.

"Perhaps we could give you some books about parahumans, to occupy your time?" Legend suggests. "I seem to recall you mentioning you don't need sleep, and some parahumans don't, either, but most do. And tomorrow we can arrange for someone from a PRT lab to come talk to you about more advanced research that hasn't been published yet."

"There's a magic song that lets you skip sleep. You don't want to use it all the time and I would need to look up what the tolerances are for humans but I could play it right now and you'll feel like you just got a great night's sleep."

Hero looks at Legend, who just sighs long-sufferingly. "I think this will be all, then, we shall convene tomorrow, and Hero will probably want to entertain Epic all night." Hero does not whoop.

"Okay! Do you want to come back to my house, it's prettier than here I'll be more productive -"

Hero nods many times.

Pop! This is Epic's house. It is dazzling. He takes a two-inch-long stick and presses a button and a computer screen flickers into place; he mentally directs it to play the skip-sleep song.

"How'd you control it?"

"It's chip-locked - the only kind of computer that's safe from demons, because the way the information is stored is patterned off my brain. I have a chip in my head and I trained it to respond to my thoughts. You can have one if you want - they're safe for baseline humans but I don't know about parahumans -"

"Parahuman brains are a little bit different—we have a new area, we don't really know what it does, but all parahumans have it."

"Then I probably shouldn't be doing brain surgery on you until I know a lot more. It's okay, I'm the only demon here and I might read stuff the PRT has classified and especially stuff they deleted when they found out about me but I won't read peoples' personal notes or anything."

"It's... probably not a good idea to read the stuff the PRT has classified?" Hero says tentatively.

"Why not?"

"Lots of reasons. Some stuff is classified because if the wrong person gets captured with it then they can be tortured for it, or someone with a Master power can make them tell or a Thinker power can guess, and that'd be bad.—I guess your mind reading is a Thinker power, too, huh?"

"With your classification system, yeah. It's probably important to check whether Master powers work on me but if they do and I get attacked by a hostile one, PRT classified documents are the least of our worries. Black holes are made of matter. It'd take me about five seconds to destroy the world."

"—oh shhhhoot," he corrects himself halfway. "Yeah we definitely do not want a Master to get their hands on you. Yikes. Okay, um. We can't test that now, everyone's gonna be asleep and, uh, we'll check it tomorrow, yeah?"

"Yeah. And we won't publicize that, it's an obvious implication but people don't always think of it. And oaths might work."

"Oaths?"

"Elf thing. If we give our word it's binding - like, if I swear not to feed the planet into a black hole, it'd be impossible for me to break my word. So unless there's a Master power that erases oaths or works around them somehow, I can just think really really carefully about a phrasing and then swear not to do things if I might be under the influence of mind-affecting magic."

"And would it work?—also that's terrifying and you shouldn't do it." Pause. "But would it work?"

"I don't know but we can check tomorrow with a Master and a really safe oath like "I swear that for the next ten minutes I won't say 'purple'" or something. And it is terrifying and I shouldn't do it but it'd be worth thinking about if there are people around with mind-control."

"Not... exactly mind control, although I guess Sleeper could be said do to something like mind control... But there are some scary powers out there, and they get scarier all the time."