"Yes, I expect the leading cause of death is going to be cholera or something, but if you look past the death toll alone the knock-on effects of villains terrorizing people and making it clear how untrustworthy the ruling class is can't be trivial."

"Absolutely - is it better where you're from?"

"Yes! Yes it is! People sometimes - pay hush money about sex scandals or get exonerated on technicalities for borderline murder cases or something, but they absolutely do not round up a few other people from a party and go out hunting random people and expect to get away with that!"

"How are espers prevented from doing so?"

"...it's too flip to say 'we don't suck'. Espers are random people and suck random amounts. But we are not legally nor tacitly permitted to do murders and espers only started happening after most countries were kind of over having nobility at all."

"My best guess is that the empowered were almost entirely commoners at first, but this wasn't a stable state for society and over the course of the Dark Ages the empowered became nobility via one route or another."

"Espers run in families but not as much as your thing does, only a tiny amount you need to look at millions of people to detect, we can't establish esper dynasties."

"I do suppose that would discourage the situation we have ended up in."

"Honestly apart from the fact that they were involving superpowers I would not be astonished to find that something like this was popular in this approximate era on my Earth. I wouldn't have specifically guessed England but I wouldn't have called -" bullshit - no - "it an obvious error if someone told me it was."

"What changed?"

"Well, our superpowers didn't start appearing till the 1970s and that left a lot of time for power levels to - level out, over time. Guns, democracy, liberalism."

"Ah, guns are almost entirely useless against empowered, democracy not seen since Rome, and liberalism never venturing beyond the bounds of academic libraries, unfortunately."

"True in this year in my time too but it changed. - well, we didn't have empowered, but guns get better."

"As of now they are unreliable and if fired point black still wouldn't seriously harm most empowered - if that were to change I could see it altering the balance of power quite a bit."

"I do not go into dungeons and shoot monsters with muzzle-loading muskets. Though if one of those wouldn't seriously harm you point blank that suggests it'd take more tech advances here than it did in my world."

"It would likely leave a bruise."

"I agree that that's not serious harm." He prods a bruise on his shoulder thoughtfully.

"Is your shoulder okay?"

"I've had worse."

"In the course of saving people from monsters or something else?"

"Mostly before that. I used to have a balance problem, I fell down all the time. Awakening solved it and fortunately 'not having a balance problem' doesn't cost backlash so I can still do it even if the superhero doesn't find me like they said they would."

"The superhero who transported you here last night can fix your backlash?"

"I wound up touching their hand a little when they flew me here. They felt like a compatible esper. Not amazingly compatible - or, like, it was weird, almost more like the way it feels when I'm standing a few feet away from my partner, except I didn't feel anything till I touched their hand, but at any rate I don't think the guiding rate would be amazing. But it would be anything."

"And that guiding eliminates your backlash?"

"Yeah."