"Turning into other people, receptive empathy, absolute polyglottism, copying the skills of one person at a time..."

"Hunh. Interesting. How does the - fealty part of the swearing fealty to you operate?"

"I can make them do things. Back home, there were three kinds of people who swore to me--those who trusted me utterly, those who were desperate, and criminals for whom it was an alternative to the death sentence." 

"No one was just in it for the superpowers or the youth?"

"I refused to accept the fealty of those I didn't believe took things seriously enough. Those who were very old and wanted to live I count among the desperate." 

"What did you usually - do with them?"

"Expanded my influence. Interfaced with other organizations involving people with powers. Took down people who were abusing their powers. Enforced good behavior in my territory." 

Delin nods. "Do you think your presence here might attract attention from any other aliens?"

"I don't know. --This is hearsay but the hearsay is relatively consistent; if aliens do show up and start offering people powers, the ones that pretend to look like you are less trustworthy than the ones that look openly alien." 

Delin looks at her.

"--Okay I realize how that sounded but that's not what I meant, the kind of aliens I mean show up, offer to make a deal with you and then leave. I'm going to have to stick around and be accountable enough for my actions that nobody's sufficiently motivated to figure out how to assassinate me at the very least." 

"All right. And there's a kind that look overtly alien? Do those also make deals?"

"I'm less sure. There are fewer people who've gotten their powers from them than from the other side, and I wasn't exactly in a position to interrogate either of the people I met who got their powers from them." 

"Why's that?"

"Why do they give fewer people powers or why wasn't I in a position to interrogate their beneficiaries?"

"Both, but I was more optimistic you'd know the latter."

"Well, Hiroko was the leader of a major governmental agency, and Kanimir was at first under the thumb of Lia Malolu and later recovering from same, and then Hiroko scooped him up to come work for her agency." 

"Who are these people?"

"Hiroku Tokugawa is the three-hundred-year-old leader of the Grey Sector, a government agency for dealing with people with powers. Lia Malolu is--was--a powered person who had the ability to control other people with powers, but only if they set foot on the island she was born on. Kanimir Kozlov is someone who functions essentially as a human supercomputer." 

"I see. I'd ask more about them but they seem less than immediately relevant. What are your interests here?"

"It's difficult for me to identify specific interests relative to the local political climate because I haven't had very much opportunity to assess the local political climate, but in general what I do is I use my power to leverage people into dealing in good faith with one another, and in general promoting positive-sum interactions and the wellbeing of everyone I can reach. So far my only specific goal here is to amass enough of a power base to make Tapa cut it out on the killing babies front; but that's because they're the main problem I've identified, not because I expect it to be objectively high-priority once I have a better handle on the local situation." 

"That's a priority everyone but Tapa will appreciate," Delin assures her. "How does the leveraging people into good faith work?"

"The way I started out, the first time, was that there was a local business interest that was providing low-quality products and using unethical tactics to get people involved with them, and what I did was I used my power to provide higher-quality alternatives and protect myself and my allies from their retribution until I had managed to completely outcompete them. And then I identified business practices that companies use to maximise profits at the expense of consumer welfare and flatly forbade anyone in my employ from using any of them." 

"So less of a diplomacy-directed practice than I was imagining, all right."

"I grew up in a rough neighborhood; my planet doesn't have a caste system but if we did I'd definitely be purple, not blue. Diplomacy wasn't a priority in my education."