"Oh? Any particular reason?"

"I'm pretty sure they conscript people with superpowers. You might be able to visit, but I wouldn't move there if I were you."

"Good to know. Anyplace else I should avoid or pay special attention to?"

"...Not that I'm aware of, but I'm definitely not up to date. But I'm pretty sure no one but the Chinese have a chance of stopping you from leaving if you want to."

"Fair enough..." she has some more of her food. "Is most of what superheroes do fighting?"

"For most of them, probably yes. Although maybe part of that is because people who don't make a habit of fighting superpowered threats aren't called 'superheroes'."

"I guess I asked my question badly... I think what I meant to ask is whether most people with powers use them for fighting or if people use their powers for other things."

"I don't really know. There is definitely a lot of fighting, but not everyone does. If anyone has collected statistics, I don't know them, and I think it's hard to tell because a lot of people with powers, particularly less flashy ones, keep a low profile. So my impression is that people with superpowers fight each other a lot, but I don't know if that's true of the population in general."

"Do you think I'll need to fight? I don't plan on seeking out a fight but will one find me?"

"It's possible. You don't seem like the kind of person who would make enemies, and few sane people would pick a fight with someone who has a power ring. But there are always the crazies."

"I guess I'll just have to hope for the best and trust that God will give me the tools to handle any situation I find myself in. And learn more about my ring of course. I assume it can help me prepare too."

"For some things, sure. And uh, if you want my advice, don't take your ring off when you don't have to."

"That seems like good advice. Do you know if there's a way to hide the glow? I imagine there are times I'd prefer not to advertise."

"Wear gloves? I don't think there's any way to turn it off entirely."

"Oh would that work? I would have thought my ring would mention that but maybe I asked the question wrong. I need to get better at that. I'm sure there's other bad assumptions I've made based on asking a different question than I thought I was."

He laughs.

"That's a classic example of how ring computers work. Ask if the ring can stop glowing, it will tell you no, that's not possible. But it won't tell you that you can wear a glove over it because that's not what you asked."

"Exactly, do you have any tips on noticing things like that?"

"Hmm. Be as specific as you can, ask the best way to achieve the outcome you want rather than asking about a specific way to do it, and try to avoid making it figure things out about people or social stuff—it does pretty well with physics and chemistry and stuff like that, but seems to have trouble figuring out what people are doing. If your ring works like ours do, then it should have pretty sensible defaults for trading off between charge use, effectiveness, your safety, and so on."

"Thank you I'll try to keep that in mind."

"Do you know if your Earth has anything we don't? Other than Google assistant. I'm kinda thinking of it as like here, but without a lot of the interesting stuff, but I don't know if that's fair."

"I'm not really sure, it's also hard to know what was around back in 2010 because I had a pretty sheltered upbringing and I was also pretty young. Is the US regularly sending drones into countries it's not at war with here? That's probably the wildest thing I can think of off the top of my head."

"No, that doesn't happen here. I don't think the US has been involved in any wars since the nineties."

"Does that mean you didn't have an attack in 2001 where some planes crashed into buildings in New York and DC?"

"Uh, nope. I don't think anyone would even attempt that with Superman around."

"You're pretty lucky then. A lot of bad stuff happened downstream of that. Are people talking about climate change? As I understand it, people started talking about that in the seventies but it's really been coming into focus in the last twenty years or so."