"But you probably do also have some actual range limit because you didn't get a thing to appear on camera in Philly...?"

"...Oh. Wanna see if you can appear a thing in my workshop from here?"

"Yeah!"

A bot projects onto the bottom of the boat a view of the workshop.

Duck on the desk!

"Ha. Okay, so your range qua range is big enough to be legitimately challenging to test, but for other reasons, when unassisted you are mostly visual-or-immediate-staging-area range. Next time I'm around the world at a Simurgh fight after she flies off I'll get you a private feed of some place."

"Yeah, that sounds good." Pause. "I could make my gun remotely."

"And then the Simurgh figures out how it works because she's the fucking Simurgh and everyone present knows your secret weakness. This would be bad. Everyone should only know your secret weakness if I disappear mysteriously and my robots think you did it."

"...that is an actual thing you thought of and arranged, isn't it."

"Who, me?"

"I'm a little bit in love."

"My paranoid threats to your efficacy as a cape are a love potion now. I'll have to report myself for further powers testing immediately."

They laugh. "I'm pretty sure they wouldn't work on most not-me people."

"Fair enough."

"But anyway, I'm not a Tinker, how would the Simurgh copy me? Especially if I was very far away."

"She can fuck people up in ways that don't manifest for years, you don't think she could investigate your power from the opposite hemisphere if it were annoying her?"

"Well, but how would she actually use it? She can't conjure things, she can only build them, and my things are make-believe."

"The problem isn't, 'she copies your gun'. The problem is, 'she sings that the gun is not real into everybody's heads, and they remember that, and not all of them are trustworthy'."

"...she can do that? Sing information into people's heads?"

"I don't know, but I don't think it's a risk you should take at least until you've killed both of the others."

"I mean, unless you've been under the influence before you've probably got uncontaminated judgment and my main advantage is conservatism. But neither Leviathan nor Behemoth could nope you as totally and permanently as she could, so you should save her for last."

"Well I've never been anywhere near the Simurgh so probably not, but you never know, maybe this is a long con and she actually can affect everyone everywhere and the song is just a decoy. If anyone would do something as ridiculously convoluted as that, it's the Simurgh."

"If that's how she works maybe I'm not immune to her after all and she's setting me up, but at a certain point we'll be totally paralyzed if we don't make certain baseline assumptions."