"There are several reasons why we decided to call you here, the most salient of which being the peal of which you speak. But to answer one question: powers do, in fact, work in adjacent dimensions. Most of them, in fact, come from adjacent dimensions."

"A specific one? Or just, like, all of them -"

"Well, probably not all of them, based on how you suggested the network functions, but at least an unthinkably large number of them."

"I think I need an example."

"Of?"

"How the magic works off other dimensions."

"Sometimes it is merely energy—Alexandria's muscles could not bend steel, so that force must be coming from somewhere. Sometimes it is matter, directly—I trust you have met Miss Militia. And in all cases, the actual source of the power is a shard of an Entity, located in another world and helping control it."

"...and why are the Entities giving people powers..."

And at that everyone gets glummier.

"Our current understanding," Hero explains, "is that it's part of a reproductive cycle of sorts. They are absolutely uncreative, so they borrow other species' creativity: give them powers based on knowledge they've collected in the past, modify their brain architecture such that they're more conflict-prone and select for more conflict-prone people in the first place, pitch powers against one another, collect new uses and combinations and inventions that they might use in the future to stay alive for longer."

"And after our creativity has been exhausted, destroy the species—and all of its alternate-universe variants—and move on," Eidolon says in a rare moment of verbosity.

"Destroy - why, is that part even necessary -"

"It is more a natural consequence of the cycle than that—they feed conflict on a global scale and the terminal phase of such conflict is the total annihilation of the species by itself."

"- and all of the alternate universes - how many - are they all different or are they just copies -"

"Different, in the alternate histories sense—it would appear all universes here diverged from one another at some point in the past."

"How - how many -"

"Billions. Trillions, maybe, although the vast majority never evolved life in the first place—the vast majority doesn't have an Earth in the first place."

"Okay so how do we stop them."

    "This organization has been our answer to that question," Doctor Mother explains. "They usually come in pairs—the planner and the executor, in certain ways—specializing differently, each half of a pair having a different take on their powers—but something went wrong this cycle. We've been piecing it together but don't have a complete enough picture to do anything more than speculate. What we do know is that Scion's mate—Eden, we've been calling her—crashed onto an Earth before she was ready, before her plans were completely laid out and the powers she was meant to give out were properly crippled so as to be unable to harm her and Scion."

Legend frowns. "You never told me this part."

...lie detection song, too quiet for human hearing...

    Doctor Mother continues, completely honestly: "This is not pretty, Legend, and we would spare your suffering when you could not help. Contessa," and she nods at her bodyguard, "has a very strong power: she wins."

Legend squirms uncomfortably. "Wins at what?"

    "Everything. If she sets a goal to herself, she knows what steps she must take to make it come to pass."

"- wow."

Legend processes this. And his frown deepens. "Then—"

    "Eden crippled her power when she—it—realized what had happened. Contessa cannot use her power on either of the Entities." Pause. "She could not use her powers on Behemoth, either."

"So - do you have a way to beat them or not -"

"When she crashed, Contessa—with my help—managed to kill Eden. Or—stop her development at a critical junction, make her unable to continue building. She's effectively brain dead. And her shards are not crippled—they can actually be used against the Entities. So we've been distilling them and refining them into vials of—liquid powers. People who get powers from vials do not trigger normally, do not go through trauma, tend to have more useful powers, and can be used to fight Scion." She looks at Eidolon. "Eidolon is our greatest achievement so far—he can use any powers—and if we can find one or two more of him... we might stand a chance." She looks at Epic. "Then you arrived, thwarting all of our precogs."

He would bounce but billions of worlds. "And I might be able to do it. Or the peal might be able to, I'll tell them to come find us right away -"