But if you think you're less smart than you think you are, don't you end up in fact thinking you're less smart than you thought you thought you were...? Where does it end?

Well, in theory the feedback loop could be dampened and it'd end at a finite specific quantity, but in practice I basically just consciously keep all my unconscious thoughts about my smartness and goodness in check.

As long as it works for you, I guess.

Not very well, actually! But it's better than the alternative.

That'll have to do.

Yup!

Do you have the new weapons to try, by the way?

I've been doing a lot of design work to distract myself from my real problems, so yes.

Your real problems?

Not being able to apologize to the person I nearly killed, that sort of thing.

Well. Allowed. Not being allowed to apologize to the person I nearly killed. I'm sure I am technically able to manage it if I try.

Yeah. I mean, she didn't actually die, she might not even know there's something you should be apologizing for.

She will have noticed that I hit her with a staff-sized force blast. That's not the sort of thing that's easy to miss.

Well, yes, but she doesn't necessarily know she almost died of it.

It's still worth apologizing for on its own, by most people's standards. At least when the people involved are Aluvai. Do capes who hospitalize each other just go about their business afterward with no hard feelings?

No more hard feelings than otherwise, more or less. In fact, if a cape who hospitalized another came back to apologize I'm pretty sure the other would assume that was taunting and there'd be more hard feelings.

That seems stupid.

Well, think about it from her perspective. Someone just literally almost killed her, and then they go and say, 'I'm so sorry I was powerful enough to drop you in one hit,' not bound to help, yeah? And of course you won't phrase it like that but capes are selected for liking conflict and drama.

Seems like a cultural difference, then. If I was almost killed and woke up in the hospital and the person who did it had the capacity to visit me and apologize but didn't, I'd be tempted to send a strongly worded letter, depending how I felt about the incident. If they did show up, I'd expect to be able to tell the difference between gloating and a sincere apology. And even gloating I might accept if it came with good-faith observation of the principles of reconciliation.

That's probably true among normal people anyway. It's just, capes.

I still would prefer to at least try reconciliation. Capes can't be that bad, at least not unfailingly. My teammates are capes and they mostly aren't.

If you say so. I mean, they did go through horribly traumatic experiences to get powers, and then went ahead to join an organization dedicated to basically fighting other people.

Hasn't anyone tried being nice to villains? They haven't, have they.

Define 'being nice to villains'...? Most interactions with them seem to follow the general script of "Hey, you, stop doing that illegal thing you're doing!" "Make me!" *fight*

Finding out why they are doing illegal things. Encouraging them to pursue alternate forms of income/entertainment/etc. I can't be the only person who's thought of this. Maybe everyone else was too cynical. Or picked the wrong villain to befriend and got themselves killed.

You'd have to actually get one to stay still and listen to you. You can't just come up to one and talk because secret lairs, and when you do manage to talk you're still aligned on opposite sides so they don't want to listen. That said, there have been some mysterious villain disappearances followed by mysterious hero appearances that had suspiciously similar powersets to the disappeared villain's. Also yes to being too cynical and probably to getting themselves killed.

I would absolutely do this exact thing if I hadn't just spent my first month as a Ward pissing off successively more powerful and highly placed members of the biggest local villain organization. I mean, they're E88, so that doesn't necessarily burn any bridges with anyone who isn't a racist, but it does sort of set me up a public reputation that would get in my way if I tried to come over all diplomatic on somebody.