And he bounds into them and squeezes him tighter than it's safe to squeeze humans - "I wrote the peal but they might not find us in time and there're billions of worlds going to get destroyed -"

Squeeze. "That's an excellent reason, I'm not mad at you, billions of worlds - how much time do we have -"

"For this world, decades. For all the others—I don't know."

"If what we know of physics is right it might well be the case that there's one world dying per second or something."

"Hello, Maitimo. It is a pleasure to meet you. I am Legend. These are Hero, Alexandria, Eidolon, Doctor Mother, and Contessa."

"Pleasure to meet you as well -"

"It's an Earth it's 1994 and there're evil aliens that give people superpowers I got lost like a week ago, I've been writing home -"

- you can send it while they talk, I have more than two conversations' attentional capacity -

Okay - 

He starts doing that -

"Epic can probably send you a summary of the whole situation faster than we can discuss it unless I misunderstand how osanwë works," Alexandria says. "The gist of it is correct—we would have told him of this earlier but we were checking with precogs about his likely reaction—I'm sorry about that, Epic, but we did need to be very very sure that you were honest and right about your peal."

"He's sending one, we can talk simultaneously, I can also draw up a list of people who've consented to be forked under emergency conditions simultaneously, if there's anything else I should be doing I might become a less entertaining conversationalist. What hasn't come up with him yet?"

"Every major parahuman organization in the world exists because of us. The Protectorate was the first, but we've been running tests with all of them to see what works best—the Suits, the Yàngbǎn, the South American dictatorships—I drafted a long term plan a few years ago that would culminate in us evacuating the Earth and creating parahuman-led and controlled settlements that would be able to properly defend against Scion and manage their villain problem."

"Do people trigger off-planet, do we know or have a fast way to find out? Is there a reason not to evacuate Earth now, is it likely to set Scion off?"

"We don't know what will set Scion off, but we strongly suspect if anything that will. Vials work in other dimensions, including ones without Earths on it, so people probably can in fact trigger off-planet."

"...you made the military dictatorship in Brazil? To see if it'd work."

"Not exactly—the military dictatorship in Brazil existed before parahumans did, we merely co-opted it."

"Okay. How do the portals work, if we set up operations on a planetoid in intergalactic space somewhere can you link us up with Earth? Is Scion aware of what's going on on the other Earths, can we evacuate those?"

"Scion is aware, for a certain sense of the word, of what's going on in all universes we have access to—it's a shard of the other Entity that enables us to do it in the first place. We believe Scion may be blocking access to some worlds, as we have not been able to find his body. The way we create portals is by using two parahumans—Doormaker and Clairvoyant. The latter—"

    A portal opens and a man in a suit appears. "Behemoth seems to have a successor," he says without preamble.

"Explain."

He opens a laptop and shows them the feed.

The creature is some five to ten feet shorter than Behemoth, a broad, feral Buddha in appearance. Its skin is jet black, with silver light defining its features and giving shape to its body. All across the exterior of its there are gaps, like the gills of a fish, and that brilliant white or silver glimmers from beneath. Instead of a regular torso, it has a silver sphere. It doesn't touch the ground, waddling in the air, and wherever it walks, a couple of cylindrical forcefields follow, translating around him in constant motion. Wherever they touch, destruction happens. The effect is not unlike a few hundred years had passed within them.

    "It appeared in Cape Verde," the man explains.

"I can put it in intergalactic space too."

"Door," Doctor Mother says, and there's a portal.

And now he and the thing are really, really far away.

And now the thing's gone.

He heads back - "it can teleport -"