"I'm pretty hungry, actually, but I should warn you - I eat more than should be physically possible. Especially with needing to heal this - " he gestures to his missing arm. "I'll eat just about anything most folks do, but foods high in minerals help with the healing. Nuts, seeds, beans, that sort of thing." 

"How does granola sound then? And juice?"

"Sounds great, thanks." He plops into the couch, resting his good arm on the back. 

A small table with a large bowl of granola a copper colored spoon and a tall glass of purple juice appears beside the couch within arms reach.

He digs in, finding time between bites to comment, "You're more hospitable than most places I've been. Thanks and kudos. 

"So, Tristan, can you tell me more about Starlight's current conflicts? I practically guarantee I can help somehow, and I'm happy to share what I can do." Some of it, anyway. For now. 

He brings up a visual representation of the local multiverse there's blobs of color and smaller motes all around a bright shiny speck of light with strings connecting it to everything. "There are nine areas of concern in the parts of the multiverse where we have operations. The first and most encompassing is in the Jovian's cluster. They live in a cluster of about 300 universes though they aren't able to travel between them. Our primary focus in that cluster is an expansionist hive mind that incorporates those they conquer into their hive mind by force.

That work is occupying the majority of our time because we believe they are the most likely of our current threats to be able to become more threatening if left unattended. A secondary concern in that cluster is a very conflict prone universe which seems to be almost continuously either at war or dominated by oppressive empires it shifts quite dynamically though and there isn't any faction we feel comfortable supporting.

The next most relevant area of concern is another cluster this one has a high concentration of genocidal threats, we're focusing our attention in a single universe within that cluster, unfortunately that cluster contains several stable time loops that makes certain forms of intervention difficult.

This cluster over here has extremely concerning magical conflicts on a semiregular basis but they also have a habit of resolving themselves safely without our involvement. As such, we mostly observe.

This smaller cluster here is actively monitored as criminal organizations in this area make a habit of unleashing cataclysmic forces. Somehow natives are usually able to counteract these events but we've taken to preventative actions as local surveillance capabilities are insufficient for the task.

The last of the major clusters in our area very recently fought a significant multiversal war for the fate of that entire cluster. We intervened to assist and we now administer the local afterlife. The native means of multiversal travel is damaging to the involved universes so it has been removed and we monitor to ensure it doesn't reemerge.

And then there's the singleton universes that represent cause for concern: There's one universe with what is as far as we can tell an extremely powerful god who has firmly rebuffed any effort to involve ourselves, we still keep an eye on it.

Second is a universe where an extremely powerful species seems to be setting up to harvest entire biospheres for an unclear purpose on rather long timescales. We prevented this action on one world in that universe but we're not sure how to locate more worlds under threat.

There's also a universe which is nearing its end currently in a timeloop we could turn off if desired. We're actively working to evacuate people but we've hit the point of diminishing returns.

Finally, a recently contacted world is potentially under threat from an pair of genocidal gods. We don't know how powerful they are or if they are still actively genocidal just that they have committed genocide in the past and threatened to do so again if they are summoned and the people of the world aren't sufficiently united."

He listens intently, lights of the multiverse reflected in his sparkling eyes. He wasn't kidding about the food; the granola's almost gone by the time Tristan finishes his summary. 

"I could help with any of those," he muses, "some more than others. If you have any weapons that are effective but hard to wield, for instance, I can make maximal use of them. I can also poison-pill a hive mind, to some degree or another.

"My powers are limited right now," he explains, "but in my prime I was perfectly capable of handling genocidal gods. While I wait for my strength to return, I've been using more subtle powers and simple experience to influence the outcomes of major wars, and to prepare various worlds to repel Netherling invasions. If I expected your cluster to come under assault in the near future, I might recommend dropping me in the constantly-warring universe cluster; I have a knack for organizing militaries against external threats. But as is, there's not yet an obvious target...you mentioned time loops; do you have access to time dilation, by chance?" 

"That form of technology is available in the cluster with the time loops. Depending on what you mean by poison pill that might be helpful in our fight with the hive mind. They call themselves the Borg. Our main difficulty there is their sheer population and our commitment to recovering the constituent members alive. As things stand, we are intercepting 95% of their aggressive actions and are decreasing their population on net by an estimated 1% per year."

"Oh, those creeps. Man, it's been a long time since I had to deal with the Borg. You've got three hundred universes of them? My condolences. They tend to get worse with time. Before now, I was only aware of two or three such universes in our cluster, though I'm sure we could find more if we looked. If I recall, they're pretty good at adapting to new attack vectors. I borrowed a few techniques from them, actually. Took everything I had to get out from under their brainwashing, but that was a long time ago. 

"They've never met something like me before. I'm extremely resistant to compulsions, and I've had enough practice with physical, magical, and psionic domination attempts over the millenia that I can configure the outer layers of my mind into a sort of elaborate virus or labyrinth-trap. Enemies who try to possess me have a good chance of becoming me instead. It works better if I know who or what is attacking me, and prepare for it. The Borg are tricky, but if I recall right they are purely technological and have a bad habit of downloading first and debugging later. I could probably subvert and disable a cube from within if they tried to assimilate me. Give 'em something their adaptation protocols think is cool, let 'em download it into every drone in a cube, and whoops-a-daisy they're all infected. Multiple connected cubes have better defenses and response time, though, so I don't think I'd risk it on more than one. 

"Afterwards they'd update their protocols, but if the universes don't communicate, we could pull the same trick three hundred times.

"Alternatively I could drop in one universe as a mole and feed you their plans, but given the number of universes you're dealing with, that seems less than ideal." Also kind of a boring way to spend the next few decades.

"My power debt is a long story, but if you can get me forty-five years of time in a dilation field, or alternatively about ten to the fiftieth joules of energy, I'll get my full power back, and I can start dismantling Borg cubes or contend with genocidal gods or whatever you need." 

"We've only confirmed Borg presence in one universe, even with our capabilities we can't explore entire universes quickly so most of our operations are centered around our entry points. Regardless we can handle cubes without much difficulty on average we process 1000 cubes per day. As for time dilation we could likely make that happen. There's a known settlement within a 100 to 1 time dilation field and we've seen examples of time dilation being used by another civilization we have friendly relations with. As for the power consumption I don't think that's something we could easily achieve. Well, unless you're willing to take a long shot bet."

"Six months or so outer time on a settlement doesn't sound too bad, but it's still 45 years of my time and I'd rather be doing things. What's this long shot?" 

"In one universe there's a strange entity which the locals call the eye of the universe. There are conflicting theories about what would happen if anyone goes inside. We've been putting it off because one of the theories is that entering will make the universe collapse followed shortly by a new big bang. Nobody actually knows though and we can't test it in advance."

"Intriguing. That seems like it might be bad for the universe in question, though. Got any more granola?" He holds out the empty bowl. 

"Certainly," granola materializes out of nowhere and pours in to fill the bowl. "And yes it would be. It's a complex ethical quandary because the universe is in a short timeloop. Our best estimate is that if we end the time loop every star in the universe will die within the next week, most of them violently. We've done a fairly thorough search of the nearest fifteen thousand galaxies and we're not sure how long people would be able to survive past that final state. We could just end the time loop and let things be, we could maintain the time loop hoping we find a way to more efficiently rescue people from that warped existence or we could experiment with the Eye. If we hadn't intervened then one of the locals would have already entered the Eye."

He grins at the granola fountain. "That's quite the conundrum. Seems like you have to choose between everyone effectively stuck in stasis and maybe a bunch of people dead. Well, good news and bad news, I suppose - I have some experience with, and resistance to, temporal shenanigans, and I can absorb energy if it's - hmmm, this is hard to translate - formatted correctly? but I doubt I could take a big bang to the face without disintegrating first. I'm happy to take a stab at the time loop problem, maybe there's something in the universe itself I can use..." He sits in silence for a while, alternating between granola and purple juice.

"I've got more options than usual since this cluster seems to allow any kind of physics or magic, that's rare, my own travel magic limits me to a given universe's own rules. Wait, are there energy sources in the time loop itself that could be exploited? If you don't mind losing some giant stars that will get looped back anyway, I might be able to jumpstart an absorption loop if I had an external source of power, maybe some tech or magic to work with. I need to know more about the universe in question to be sure, but there might be something there. We should compare notes - you might even be able to use some of my magic, even if I can't." 

"Stars are much smaller in this universe but we do have technology to channel a substantial portion of a supernova about one percent into a concentrated area and that could be adapted. As for the flexibility I think that more applies to this place than the cluster as a whole. We have control of how physics spreads from this place to the other universes in the cluster."

"Stars are smaller? I suppose I've seen stranger things. Maybe it'd be better to find supernovae elsewhere, but that sounds like the type of tech it would take to recharge me, scaled up. Now, controlling the spread of physics, that sounds like a remarkably handy trick. The tactical considerations alone..." He shakes his head. "Well, that's probably moot if you've got this cluster under wraps already. You might want to watch where you put me, if you're worried about spreading physics to the wrong places. I'm currently sitting on more than a hundred distinct universe-rulesets, to say nothing of slight variations on similar ones. We probably ought to run some tests to make sure I can't accidentally contaminate your worlds with soul eating, vampirism, underagony, elder corruption, or the Dark Side of the Force, like some kind of world-disease. I doubt it, but you really don't want underagony in your afterlife." 

"Stars being smaller is pretty weird yeah. Physics is deeply strange in that universe in general. And yes, if you're likely to alter local physics then that's something we would want to be careful about. Oddly enough the time loop in that world also resets changes in physics so that's likely where we would do tests. Nothing else we've found seems able to undo changes in physics."