"So it sounds like you have reason to be very - suspicious - about errors in the direction of reacting strongly towards neutralizing threats, or even things that aren't technically errors because the threats exist - you've seen it done harmfully, experienced it, and by comparison feel more comfortable with the risks involved in potentially-threatening people around you retaining those abilities?"

"...Just to clarify, that was already my stance before I'd experienced it." The idea of unpacking how that experience affected his views for Melda sounds really unpleasant and it's not missing very much nuance to say it didn't, so.

"My mistake. But at any rate that is your stance, that it's worse to err on the one side, or invest in avoiding errors in the one direction, compared to the other. Yes?"

"...Sure? But also now you sound like you in fact think there's a cost there - an inherent one, not one that you can happen to incur if you do it wrong - whereas in every single thing you or Zua has previously said it's seemed extremely obvious that you don't."

"- oh okay, I can see how - no, it's absolutely imposing a cost on people to have this much forensic capacity and monopoly on force available to level at them even if they as individuals never meet it in their lives. I believe we are doing better with the organization and management of the powers than our absence - since most of the powers existed already - by an absolutely enormous margin but we are paying for it with people's - ability to not have to account for themselves to strangers."

"Okay." Shrug. " - I wonder if that's exactly the inverse of the thing where you folks make such a huge deal of violence or not quite."

"Maybe, say more?"

"Because - you could imagine it as almost the same kind of thing - you can say 'we'll do our best not to leave people weaker, because there are horrible things down that road, even if you could make the argument that people don't really need to be able to teleport just to be able to get around in their daily lives and the damage they can do is really tremendous', and you can also say 'we just won't hurt people or stand by and let people be hurt, because there are horrible things down that road, even if you could make the argument that the occasional bruise doesn't really matter and it's miserable to be cut off from fully interacting with each other', and the horrible things are the same horrible things."

"Yes. That sounds right to me. And compared to the kinds of things you'd be used to in a Bronze Age human environment, with our power and our scale I think the costs of one strategy outpace the other - it'd be reasonable to disagree, of course, but it's absolutely not that we don't hate taking people's abilities and freedoms away."

"The example Zua gave was that you could teleport a planet into the sun. The scale is impressive but we’ve done uglier."

"It's a standard example mostly because it exemplifies the scale, not - creativity. There's a template of evil gods that we don't negotiate with and don't put on trial and just kill on discovery because they like to put prisoners through accelerated-time hallucinations of torture and betrayal and loss until they are often permanently insane even when released and only want to be dead forever, is that more the sort of thing?"

"...Yeah, that would have been logistically difficult for us last year, no comment on this one. Uh, but like you seem to have noticed, it’s not good to have them alive and damaged either, and I'm skeptical of the existence of anyone it is good to have alive and damaged but not good to have whole."

"Is there any kind of slightly more concrete example you'd find paradigmatic that I could talk about here to have more of a handle on what details matter?"

"I’m not sure what you’re asking for."

"I think it would be easier to talk about, say, an unethical subtle artist who mishandled their patients and passersby and got their powers suppressed, or a teleporter who went around committing murders of passion with this ability, or an eclipsed who worked for the aforementioned evil god's right hand, or a morpher who enjoyed turning into venomous snakes and biting people, than about the justice system encompassing all of those."

"Sure. Let’s say I don’t know a lot about subtle arts yet and want to hear about that."

"Subtle arts are a class of powers originating in Materia, a hostile world - the world, itself, is hostile - which we are gradually evacuating from the outside. People with the ability hereditarily or wished-on have some aptitude for any or all of telepathy, telekinesis, and pyrokinesis, but the first one is what gets the most attention. In Materia it's often used in a therapeutic context to help patients with, say, nightmares or anxiety. It can do things that are sufficiently unobtrusive that they could go unnoticed till our accessible precog windows had been and gone, and also irreversible. It doesn't feel like anything to have it done to you. It works through walls. Practitioners can have substantial range, even with strangers. It's extremely useful, subtle artists who have any competence at all in the therapeutic side of things can charge what they like, so there are a lot of people who want the powers wished on. And it would not be particularly challenging for, say, a skilled subtle artist to implant a delayed suggestion in a few hundred people that some months later they would all coordinatedly start killing people, perhaps specific ones, perhaps not."

"And there are lots of people who are upstanding members of society that you’re glad to have around who are just waiting for a chance to mind control people to engage in mass killings."

"Nope. Vanishingly rare. I don't think that specific thing has ever happened. But we also want to be able to assure people that if they go to a subtle artist to get their night terrors resolved, their subtle artist not only won't do something that big, but also won't take shortcuts that endanger them, aren't using their practice as legitimacy cover to mind-control their family members, aren't taking advantage of patients while they've knocked them unconscious, that any tendencies like that would have been screened for and any record of that sort of thing would have lost them their license. We can't prevent people from doing all bad things ever - we can make sure they can't do it and keep their powers, we can make sure they can't do it twice."

"It sounds like you’re making Sesat's mistake. Which is not the same thing as being cruel, and if anything it’s the opposite, but keeping a large number of people alive and angry with you on the theory that you’re stronger and more creative than all of them put together can fail spectacularly."

"So, I think a lot of them - aren't actually angry for that long. They know the terms of their licenses, we make really sure they're clear on the law, and it's just not actually that bad, to live in Vanda Nossëo with a rap sheet. Worse than without, but not that bad."

"That sounds like the impression I have of Zua as a person. Or you. It explains why my alt would risk a blind jump to a random universe rather than live there, though."

"Speaking of," she says, "I do have a reply about whether there are more of you around on the map."

"Huh! Are there?"

She opens the message. "Looks like two, not counting the one from the other Sesat. - that's living, this check wouldn't have caught any who are ghosts or anything."