Oh, global warming. They have projections of what their industries will do to the global climate over time but no real traction on how to stop it, and yes, it hasn't been on their priority list, but it would be appreciated for the after. There's a chance a tinker might come up with something, but it wouldn't be scalable. Climate engineering might be necessary anyway to repair the environmental damage a fight with Scion could cause.

As to what she needs to stop him...

She doesn't know.

It's probably not going to be in the form of—shooting lasers and beating him up—his true body probably can't be damaged by hurting his avatar, and there's a good chance he'd win instantly if given the right motivation, so they don't want a drawn-out fight. There are capes who can mind control or instantly kill people at a distance, and since those powers came from Scion, there's no reason to think he can't do the same, potentially on massive scales. He's a higher-dimensional being spread across and between worlds, so they don't have the leverage to interact with most of him except some guesses that might not work.

There is some way to defeat or drive him off, even with only the resources her home universe. Precogs project a low but existent chance of humanity surviving through it. They may be overestimating how much power Scion has left. Still, because Scion disrupts many forms of precognition, they haven't been able to determine how they win in the futures where they win.

With that in mind, the solution she's looking for is either a massively powerful interdimensional weapon—that's why she was asking Daisy about dimensional technology earlier—to snipe his critical mass across worlds before he can react, or a mental power of sufficient scope that it can command him into stopping. Or she can simply become so personally powerful across all axes she can find that she can wrestle Scion into submission on his own level while protecting the Earth from the collateral damage.

Okay. I can check with the Force and see if I can figure anything out for you - I'm not sure what I'll get, really alien aliens can be tricky and I've never used the finding technique across worlds before, but it's worth a shot. She pauses to consider. In a couple of days, for best results, that's going to take more power than I think I can scare up right now.

We do have - maybe not full designs for planet-buster weaponry, in the library, but close enough that I could design you something. Crafting can probably make the materials you'd need for it but we'd need to do some experimenting to pin down the right stuff. And I'm not sure enough of the details of how hyperdrives work to know if repurposing them is a viable idea at all; they're incredibly dangerous to try to use in gravity wells, as the most obvious issue. It might be better to wait and see if we can crack interworld travel with the crafting magic.

Also, the Force can do mind control - it'll let you communicate with him if he's receptively telepathic, too, if that seems at all worth a try, but it sounds like it's not - and there is a genetic component, if you have that one Spirit power that lets you copy heritage. I'd want to know you better before I agreed to let you copy it, though, and you'd need training, which I'd need to think about, and it sounds like you'd need to specialize in the mind control to be sure you could get him with it, which I have to say isn't my favorite thing. But it's not off the table as an option.

She didn't realize the Force was something that could be checked with like that.

Rebecca isn't in a particularly large hurry, since time isn't passing at home. She'd rather wait longer and overdetermine victory than run back with the first solution she finds. But she'd be grateful for the resources and the help. On the tech side, there's somebody she might be able to resurrect that could help with that—she has The Rescuer, and Eternal Love might apply, though it's been almost eleven years—it's an old friend of hers, one of those capes whose power lets them build advanced technology.

(There might be a bit of bleedthrough that she has complicated feelings about going home. And even more complicated feelings about her friend.)

For mind control, she's not a fan of mind control either, but if she has the option to neutralize Scion without destroying him she wants to take it, because she doesn't know the long-term consequences of killing him. He's plugged into most of the capes on the planet, and his real body must occupy a significant amount of dimensional real estate on and around the parallel Earth's.

And there's also—she's not much tracking this because of the stakes but she does feel the need to flag—her world's standard for dealing with villains and criminals is imprisonment for limited duration or for life, with kill orders reserved for where capture and imprisonment is too dangerous or logistically infeasible. She's not sure Scion is actually a person*, but there's precedent to think about.

* His avatar exhibits some reasoning behaviors, but not any values or prioritization, and mostly runs through what appears to be programmed routines, for the past 30 years now without change. He had another half, already dead, which they suspect played the thinking role. What he is now might be more like a decapitated body running off muscle memory.

So she's not that keen on trying mind control, she had been planning on killing him with any means possible before, but now that the Spirit is giving her options, she should at least consider the possibility of a non-lethal option. (Her affect of "should" is clear that she here reluctantly considers it a professional-ethical obligation and not any deeply personal moral holding.)

For the matter of being trustworthy, she didn't take the mind control powers from the Spirit, but obviously they only have her word for it. Though she isn't sure she wants to spec into the Force here, if that's what Dusk is saying, no offense, since from their description that sounds... fraught. Iron Will sounds like it ought to prevent some of the effects but she may not want to use it as a first result.

Dusk and Daisy share a look when Rebecca mentions The Rescuer; Daisy is too hard to read to get anything from, but Dusk is startled and worried, and Daisy scoots over to put an arm around her shoulders.

That actually sounds like you might not need to specialize to mind control him after all, Dusk says when she's done. The most basic kind is mostly limited by cognitive dissonance in the target, and if there's not much cognition there probably won't be any. You'd also need a way to communicate but you can get that some other way.

If you're worried about - she gestures vaguely, and Daisy fills it in as 'the emotional instability' - that's not the only way to use the Force, and this doesn't need it. That's one of the things I'd want to figure out about teaching you, is whether I could leave that part out and still have something worth your time. It's also reasonable to not want anything to do with it, of course.

(Are they nervous about The Rescuer? Why are they nervous about The Rescuer? She reviews in her head the text of the power and its prerequisites. She's got nothing. Is she supposed to ignore that?)

That makes sense, about finding a way to use the Force without the emotionally destabilizing aspects. She decides she's undecided about it right now but will keep it in mind, pending her ever being cleared as trustworthy, of course.

...

She noticed that Dusk seemed to have some sort of reaction to her mention of The Rescuer and Eternal Love? Sorry if they didn't mean to show it, but they seemed worried and Rebecca is worried what they're worried about?

Daisy wasn't offered The Rescuer, is what that's about, and it's confusing that she wasn't. She would definitely have taken a resurrection power.

The notebook said the powers list was standardized—or it heavily implied it—she doesn't know what's going on there.

She's at a bit of a loss what to say.

By what the notebook said, The Rescuer is meant to be scalable, in a sense, a "way" (she projects the full text at them) meaning something reusable, that gets easier every time. A power for people who want resurrection to be one of their domains of concern, a part of their story. Maybe if they stick together while Rebecca—invokes the quest for The Rescuer—they can get whatever it is the "way" is?

That might be the case, yeah.

Does Dusk want to go meditate for a bit? (She's unsettled, still, and the conversation doesn't seem to be helping.)

I probably should, yeah. Sorry, she directs at Rebecca, I do usually have it together a little more than this. And she returns Daisy's hug and retires to her room.

Daisy watches her go; she's a little worried, but only a little, she's confident that Dusk will figure out how to handle what's bothering her given some time.

Does Rebecca want to compare notes on what their notebooks offered them? That might help shed some light on things.

She watches Dusk go, sympathetic but giving her space.

(Dusk would fit right in at the Protectorate. That's might be a compliment or concerning, or maybe both.)

Yes, she'll offer her build. It's long, though, and they don't have written communication down to record dit. Does Daisy have an eidetic memory? If so Rebecca will just list her build, and actually also the powers she was offered. Rebecca has an eidetic memory and will be able to remember if Daisy lists hers at Rebecca.

Daisy's memory isn't perfect but it's more than good enough for this; she shares what she was offered and what she took as well, and points out that Rebecca was offered equivalents of all of her custom powers except Choosy Book and part of Never Shall We Part - maybe she was visited by a later version of the notebook, somehow?

That does makes sense. And there are quite a few powers in the list that are derivative of or explicitly replace ones on the shared list, like A Hundred Ships and I Can Help Them, which could be powers created for other chosen who requested a slight variant. The motivations for those variants are obvious from this lens, while Rebecca was originally slightly baffled by their specificity.

Rebecca did receive the Spirit's power later than Daisy, if they lay out the timeline linearly. She wouldn't have very strongly expected that to matter to something like the Spirit, but she's not entirely surprised it might.

The Force doesn't necessarily obey linear time but it is easier for it to work that way, as another example, yeah.

She's still not sure exactly what Dusk was bothered by, but this might help; she appreciates that Rebecca was willing to help her figure it out.

Of course.

So...

One thing the notebook told her is that it's possible for unspent points to spend themselves into new powers even after you've actualized your initial selection, but very rarely and only if it's very likely to be the best use of those points for your entire life forward. And that it's possible, but even less likely, for (custom) drawbacks to be taken that way, usually to mitigate powers which are making you miserable. And the notebook said one of the reasons these are rare is to make the Spirit—predictable—to make your choices mean something and not override your will; and making some sort of legible declaration that you wish to be acted upon in that way goes some distance to attenuating the bias for nonaction.

Rebecca isn't sure this is a good idea or would work, but it's possible Daisy could request a modification to her build, taking drawbacks if necessary to pick up The Rescuer?

Rebecca thinks it's not worth it, if they can piggyback of Rebecca's The Rescuer. Most drawbacks are thoroughly not worth it, and it sounds like Daisy and Dusk do need to keep their mind-affecting powers at full operation to be safe and keep people safe, so Incomplete and Nullified are out. But she doesn't want to presume so she's mentioning it for completeness.

Daisy's mind-affecting powers are doing important work, yes. (Well, not so much in this exact situation, she thinks. But in general that's what they're for.) She wouldn't mind Great Responsibility at all, though, she's pretty sure - she's not clear on why that's supposed to be a drawback, really, that kind of ability is part of why she's considering training in the Force - and that gets her most of the way there, if it turns out to matter.

Name: Great Responsibility - Grants: +4 ☐
When someone calls out to you for help, you can hear it no matter how far away you are, and you know exactly how they feel.

Perhaps it's not as striking for Daisy as for Rebecca. Rebecca was a well-known hero in her world and, if she took that drawback, might have tens to thousands of people, many of them probably children, calling out for her help at any given moment? And she would guess that like My Ears Are Burning you don't literally go mad from it, but it wouldn't stop you from being miserable about the suffering people you couldn't possibly all help even if you dedicated all every waking moment to it.

If Daisy ends up able to duplicate herself, or so large and powerful she can reach out to everyone across all worlds who calls for her at the same time, it sounds like a fine perk to make her better at helping. But if Daisy doesn't want to do that, or gets the order of operations wrong and ends up becoming inadvertently famous in a world with trillions of people too early...

The way Rebecca chose to think about it is—powers can always be acquired the normal way in the multiverse, even if they aren't metanarratively guaranteed, but drawbacks are forever and can never be neutralized. Rebecca plans to live forever and didn't want to choose something she'd regret.

...yeah, if she were to become famous that would be bad. But if she imagines being famous, it still seems like having that power would be minor compared to the rest of the problems fame would cause her, and she suspects she'd still consider it worth it on net, for the same sorts of reasons Dusk doesn't regret specializing in sensory powers even in situations where the things they allowed her to see weren't pleasant: She doesn't want to - 'pretend the world is other than what it is' isn't the thing, exactly, but - look away from it? The world is big and any one person is small in the face of it and she's fine with that, it doesn't bother her to be small, and she'd rather have the chance to do some extra good and fail to than not have the chance at all.

- she's designed to be around Sith, is probably most of the difference between them on this; it's pretty hard for ambient suffering to bother her and marginal improvements don't seem pointless to her at all, that's often the best you can do in a situation a Sith is involved in.

That's a unique way of thinking about it. Rebecca thinks that most humans would not be able to boil it down that way, yeah. But if she's sure it works for her, then it makes sense.

And it just occurred to her—can droids do the thing Rebecca said, copy themselves into empty bodies so there are two instead of one? What happens to the Spirit and Dragon Fairy Elf Witch powers then?

She takes a moment to think about that, and concludes that she doesn't know of any reason it wouldn't work, though that's not how things are done in her world of origin - she can write her skills out into hardcopy to share with other droids, but as far as she knows there isn't existing technology to do that with experiences, and she has no idea what would happen to her powers if she was duplicated like that.

That's honestly more surprising than it would if droids could only straightforwardly fork. Droids have enough reflective visibility into their own minds that individual skills can be isolated, copied and transplanted? Do they actually understand how their cognition works down to the smallest moving parts? Rebecca's civilisation still knows very little about how human cognition, except for tinkers which can't properly explain their work to others.

Droids' minds are less all one sort of thing than humans' minds; she can isolate and do things with skills pretty trivially, since her makers wanted her to be able to do that, but she had to work hard to have any insight into most other parts of her mind, since they considered that undesirable - they weren't trying to make people, after all, but they had customers who wanted to be able to show one worker what to do and then have them all know it.