Cam makes a jailbroken (bound, gagged) two six five. "I'm not sure I wish to make such a thing on this Earth. Maybe we can't get where we ultimately need to be but can we at least get somewhere nobody is living on?"

"Other side of this. It's still an Earth, though, and is at the obvious point corresponding to here." The large rectangular hole still leads to a rain forest with different weather.

"You're sure it's uninhabited?"

"Yes. Lots of trees and animals, no people."

Cam steps through with the yet-necessary basement dwellers on float pallets behind him. He attempts to make shrunken replicas of all extant human artifacts from this planet. Nothing?

Nothing.

"Nope. Just make sure whatever you do in the first round is more like the Contessa killing the Butcher than it is like you doing the killing with an unorthodox weapon. It should work."

"I was thinking I'd make the Butcher under the Contessa for suffocation purposes rather than actually move the Contessa; does that sound right?"

"This isn't exactly well tested, but that sounds as good as any."

So Cam makes a jailbroken no-accumulated-powers Butcher with his face under the Contessa, pushing her just out of the way.

It'll work eventually. When it does, nothing appears to happen.

That's the expected result. Cam takes the pulse of the Butcher. When there is none, he says, "Here goes, unless there's a last minute objection."

"Go for it."

So Cam poisons the Contessa-Butcher.

It definitely worked. He can feel himself inheriting Butcher One's superhuman strength, and presumably durability as well. That's redundant. As for whether he got the power he was going for, that's less immediately obvious.

"...I mean, if the simulation's good enough yes that is a problem. And that explains the handicap really well... I can pick and choose what to ask it, it seems like it'll let me feed it safe information sources instead of running off and getting its own... probably okay to ask it if I can ethically ask it whatever I have in mind as an extra check... but that's still just 'I'm pretty cool a lot of the time'."

"You realize by that logic, a copy of you just died. Your power looked at the inside of your head in exactly that much detail to check your ethics, and then switched off the simulation."

"Apparently. Well. That's me. Buncha Earths on the line. I can decide I'm okay with that. I can't go around asking billions of other people if they're cool with the idea."

"Well, a moral objection to precognition isn't the weirdest I've run across. Is it going to get in the way of stopping the entities?"

"Not necessarily. I might be passing up some more elegant solution that I could have used the Contessa power for, but we know now Butchering works just fine, so I can just get a two six five jailbroken and use that to aim black holes, no?"

"You probably don't want that power permanently, but just touch the copy and you'll have it when you need it. Otherwise yes."